Famous Russian writer Leo Tolstoy once stated that “humans are endowed with a kind

of work, that is, the growth of the spirit.” Mankind experienced growth both
physically and mentally, physical growth makes a person look more mature while
mental growth truly matures a person. That being said, there are many books about
growth and maturation, especially about the development of a protagonist from
immature to mature. Moxie and Spirited Away are two good examples of books about
growth and change, alike topics brought many similarities between the two books.
However, based on the fact that the two literature pieces come from different authors,
different countries, and different cultures, there are still things that Spirited Away and
Moxie differ from each other.

Although both Spirited Away and Moxie are stories related to growth and change,
there are still many different things. From an obvious perspective, Spirited Away and
Moxie have different settings, Spirited takes place in a big bathhouse while Moxie
takes place in East Rockport. The main characters of Spirited Away are all different
creatures except for Chihiro (12 years old), while the main characters in Moxie are all
humans. There are many other differences between the two stories such as plot,
theme, and genre, it will take a thousand more words to list these obvious differences
down. Not only differences in these big things between Spirited Away and Moxie like
plot and setting, but there are also differences in details. For instance, Spirited Away
transported deeper messages about greed, human nature, society, identity, personality,
and life that trigger the reader to think deeply. On the other hand, the book Moxie
seemed shallower, it doesn’t transport many deeper messages to the reader. After I
read Moxie, I liked it and now I only remember what it roughly talked about. I feel
like Moxie is rather a book for fun, How deep the message will be if the book is only
about a diary written by a teenage girl who talks about her glorious rebel and how she
became a feminist?

Since Moxie and Spirited Away have similar topics about adolesce and change, there
must also be many similarities between these two books. Some obvious similarities
can be both Chihiro (the main character in Spirited Away) and Vivian are teenage
girls, both of them face challenges to trigger their growth and change, and both of
them successfully overcome difficulties that they face and accomplish better selves.
Both Chihiro and Vivian were girls that are timid, weak, and powerless. Looking
more closely, Chihiro and Vivian both faced challenges and they both have people
supporting them on their path to maturity. At the end of Spirited Away and Moxie,
Vivian changes from a fearful girl to a true feminist who is capable of starting a
rebellion for rights and Chihiro also turns into a young adult with bravery and
maturity. These similarities in the growing path of Chihiro and Vivian tell the reader
an important thing about how to grow, or when to grow. After reading these two
books and noticing their similarities, I concluded that the growth of changes in
personality will occur only when a person is facing gigantic challenges like living by
themselves or solving the problem of bullying in school.
To conclude, there are many differences between the books Moxie and Spirited Away
because they are written by different authors from different cultural backgrounds, they
both talk about different stories, and they both provide different central ideas to the
reader with different depths. However, the similar topic and the similar structure that
leads to changes and growth of the main characters from Moxie and Spirited Away
gives out one crucial information: for growing and changing into a better person, we
must experience big challenges and learn from these challenges.