By Howard Pyle
A gentle boy raised by monks is pulled back into his father's blood feud in medieval Germany, and loses his right hand to it.
Germany in the thirteenth century, when barons robbed travelers from their crag-top castles and called it a living. Otto's mother dies the night he's born, and his father, Baron Conrad, sends the baby off to a monastery to be raised. So Otto grows up among quiet monks, in a garden, learning to read and to paint letters, a soft-spoken child in a world that has no use for one. Then his father brings him home to the castle, the old feud catches up with them, and Otto is carried off to an enemy's dungeon. Baron Henry has sworn that no one of that family will ever strike a blow again. Otto is too small to kill, so Henry cuts off his right hand instead. Otto's father dies holding a narrow bridge to buy him time to get free. Otto lives. He's fitted with a silver hand, and grows up to become the man everyone in the region comes to for advice.
This is the far end of the shelf, the book for a child who has outgrown gentle and wants one that takes them seriously. It's short, under two hundred pages, and Pyle wrote and illustrated every inch of it himself. What makes it stick is what it won't do. It refuses to make the violence exciting. Otto never gets his revenge, never picks up a sword, never turns into the avenger the whole shape of the story keeps promising. He grows up and outlasts the feud instead. For a child who's read a stack of castle adventures, that ending has real force, and I've found it's the kind of book they keep arguing with after they close it.