Mim and the Mother Muddle (The Travelling Bookshop, #6)

By Katrina Nannestad

Illustrated by Cheryl Orsini

Reviewed by Barbara Braxton

Imagine being a young girl travelling the world in an old wooden caravan pulled by a horse that decides where they will go and which seems to have magical powers that mean borders and mountains and oceans are no barriers.  And that caravan is full of books, because it, too, has a magic that means that it is like a Tardis with so much more on the inside than appears on the outside. 

That is the life of 10-year-old Miriam-Rose Cohen (who prefers Mim), her father and little brother Nat, Coco the cockatoo and Flossy the horse.  Led by Flossy’s instinct, they travel to wherever they are needed, wherever there is a child in need of a book to make their world right again because “the line between books and real life is not as clear as people suppose.”

In this, the sixth in this series, Mim has arrived in n Salzburg — the city of Mozart and mountains, gardens and castles, Sacher torte and sausages, new people, new matches and new magic . But more importantly, it is where her mum is recovering from a nasty bump on the head.  But when they spot her in the crowd, she doesn’t remember them at all! How will they help her recover their memory and be a family again?  Can their usual practice of healing people by giving them the right book at the right time work when it’s so personal?  

This is the ideal series for young independent readers to engross themselves in as they follow Mim’s adventures and perhaps even wish they were her.  Is it the final though?  Or are there more detours as they make their way back to Vienna?  It is an ideal collection to show that you really can “Book an Adventure’ through stories, not just through rising along with Mim through Europe but also because it can lead to other series like  Pages & Co which is for slightly older, more confident readers, and which, itself, could lead them to a new author with a new series, Losing the Plot.  Or maybe just to the other brilliant tales of this wonderful author. Whichever path is followed, they are guaranteed many hours of being oblivious to the world.

ABC Books, 2025

Katrina Nannestad

Cheryl Orsini

Republished with permission