Life comes at you fast, and these past few years have come with a whole lot of extra life stuff to deal with. So it’s been a bit of a while since I’ve actually read much of anything, much less read anything to completion, and much less even than that read anything that’s left me with strong enough feelings to write another one of these.

But then I saw this book on a little shelf in a thrift shop a couple months ago offering “high fantasy and low stakes,” and it looked like the kind of chil...