Mim and the Vicious Vendetta (The Travelling Bookshop #5) by Katrina Nannestad

Title: Mim and the Vicious Vendetta (The Travelling Bookshop #5)

Author: Katrina Nannestad

Genre: Fantasy

Publisher: HarperCollins Australia

Published: 6^th March 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 240

Price: $16.99

Synopsis: The right book might just change your life …

Mim Cohen roams the world in a travelling bookshop, with her dad and brother and a horse called Flossy.

Flossy leads them where she will, to the place where they’re needed most … the place where the perfect book will find its way home.

Now Mim has arrived in wonderful Venice, city of canals, palaces, bridges, boats and … quarrels. Gondolier battles, cat-nappings and laundry theft are just the beginning. The Magnifico family and the Forte family are at war.

Mim knows they’re here to help the feuding families. To show them a better way to behave. To bring an end to the vicious vendetta.

If only Mim could find each of them the right book. If only they’d all stop reading the wrong books.

The lively new adventure from award-winning author Katrina Nannestad and beloved illustrator Cheryl Orsini.

~*~

Mim, Dad, Nat, Daisy, Coco and Flossy are back with the travelling bookshop, and this time, they’re in Venice. A land of canals, music, palaces, bridges and boats. And…two quarrelling families – the Fortes and the Magnificos. As Mim and the bookshop settle into their time in Venice, they encounter various members of each family. Individually, each member is kind and generous, yet when they see each other, each family is arguing with the other, about all sorts of things, from missing cats, to destroyed washing, and everything in between – there doesn’t seem to be a single thing that they agree on – not even where and when the fighting started, because it’s been going on for song long.

So what can Mim and her family do? Well, find everyone the right books to help the families of Venice so they stop fighting and trying to destroy each other. Mim meets Pippa Forte and Maria Magnifico separately – and likes Maria more than Pippa – unable to see how Maria can be the horrible girl Pippa says she is – until the feud spills into the streets of Venice, where fairy tales and stories like Pinocchio come to life in puppet shows, and stories about a puppet turning into a real boy spark Nat’s imagination, sock puppets, and his collection of Vs that appear throughout the book and around Venice.

Mim can see how nice each member of the Forte family and Magnifico family is when they’re not fighting – and she still thinks her dad isn’t giving everyone the right books – he must have brain freeze from their gelato! Everyone seems out of sorts, even Nat – and it feels like the tense arguments are affecting everyone – poor Mim, she knows that something is amiss with the missing cat, and is willing to do what she can to find the cat for her new friend Maria.

Now into the fifth book, we have travelled the world with Mim and her family – exploring words, stories, and cultures, and fixations on letter and word collections that evoke a sense of place and where Mim and her family are going in the next book. It is a beautiful series that is timeless and explores cultures in an accessible way for children through a fantastically magical caravan that changes its shape, books and the allows readers to travel through Europe to places they have never been before in this magical world of letters and words.

I have been reading and adoring this series since it started because it has allowed me to travel the world through words and letters, and I adore Mim as a character – she is the kind of character I would have loved as a child reader and think she’s great to highlight the magic of words, books, family and travel – and reading is a great way to travel the world and through time. It gives us places to go when we have to stay put, and I think Katrina Nannestad does this well – whether in her historical fiction or this series, because it allows readers to engage with the story on the level that suits them and shows them how they can help people in the world, even if it is in small ways. This book hinted at something that readers of this series will have be wondering about for five books – and hopefully, we get to see it happen in the next book. Another great Katrina Nannestad book!