Month: August 2024

Muggles is a Minnipin, a race of people who have lived a safe, sheltered life separated from the rest of the world for centuries, which has led most of them to become boring and conformist. Muggles wakes up one night to find the three town outcasts conferring, and more alarmingly, fires on top of the mountains that protect the Minnipin valley from outsiders. This kicks off a series of events that makes Muggles and her village as a whole reconsider who they are, where they came from, and who they want to be. A fun mix…

A memoir of the author – as the character Piri – who was a Jewish girl living through World War II in Hungary with her family. It is an important story that (unsurprisingly) gets progressively bleaker throughout the novel, but it is also dry in its telling.

Chris is a fourteen-year old living in the hills of Tennessee during the Civil War. The Union Army has control of the area, and he hates them with a passion, especially after they take his family’s food and horse. He deals with a mix of people, some who support the Union cause, some who prefer the Confederacy like him, but others are against the war entirely. His views develop with his experiences. A relatively short book with a lot of regional and historical color and an in-your-face moral of an ending.

Manjiro is a 14-year-old living in 1840s Japan, which is diplomatically isolated from the rest of the world. He and four others are shipwrecked while out fishing, and spend time on an uninhabited island. They are rescued by an American whaling ship, which kickstarts a life for Manjiro living between the two worlds. Based on a true story, the historical settings and details are fun, but the stories and characters that tie them together are thin.

Jim Keath ran away from home at age 11 to follow his uncle and become a mountain man. Shortly after, he is attacked by a grizzly bear and nearly dies, but is rescued by a group of Crow Indians, who heal him up and raise him for the next six years. By age 19, he has left the tribe and is living as a skilled mountain man like he originally wanted. However, a letter makes it to him from his biological family, and the book is an internal struggle as Jim chooses between a settled-down life…