Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Four: The Montmaray Chronicles

The Montmaray Chronicles is a young adult, historical fiction trilogy by Australian author Michelle Cooper.  (The individual titles are A Brief History of Montmaray, The FitzOsbornes in Exile, and The FitzOsbornes at War.)  The cover design of the books caught my eye on the library shelves, and I'd been wanting to read this series for a while, and when I finally got around to it, I was more than rewarded for my wait.  These are certainly the best young adult books I've read in a while, and they might very well be the best books of any sort that I've read this summer.  Why do I like them so much?  As is happily becoming more common, The Montmaray Chronicles feature a female protagonist who is, like so many of us, generally strong but with a few weaknesses that she is aware of and works on over the course of the books.  I also really liked that our female protagonist is also the first-person narrator of the stories, which are told as her diary entries, which encompass the years between 1936 and 1948.  I enjoyed the settings (a fictional tiny island kingdom off the coast of northern Spain and also WWII-era England), which felt very real to me, and the plot was more than enough to hold my interest and keep me guessing as to what would happen next, on the whole.  In short, I found this trilogy to be totally and completely absorbing--I could hardly put them down!  If you are at all fond of historical fiction of WWII in Europe or of excellent young adult fiction, then I would heartily suggest Michelle Cooper's Montmaray Chronicles.