Little Foxes

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A spellbinding animal story from War Horse author and former Children's Laureate, Michael Morpurgo.

Bullied at school, nagged in Aunty May's tenth-floor council flat, there's only one place ten-year-old Billy really feels alive - in the wilderness by the canal. There he watches a cygnet on the water and protects a family of fox cubs. Then his secret place is discovered and the fox family decimated. Unwanted and unloved, Billy and the last fox run for their lives ...

A gripping and poignant animal adventure from the master storyteller of An Eagle in the Snow, Listen to the Moon, Shadow, and An Elephant in the Garden.

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Former Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo needs no introduction. He is one of the most successful children's authors in the country, loved by children, teachers and parents alike. Michael has written more than forty books for children including the global hit War Horse, which was made into a Hollywood film by Steven Spielberg in 2011.

Several of his other stories have been adapted for screen and stage, including My Friend Walter, Why the Whales Came and Kensuke's Kingdom. Michael has won the Whitbread Award, the Smarties Award, the Circle of Gold Award, the Children's Book Award and has been short-listed for the Carnegie Medal four times.

He started the charity Farms for City Children in 1976 with his wife, Clare, aimed at relieving the "poverty of experience... many young children feel in inner city and urban areas. Michael is also a patron of over a dozen other charities. Living in Devon, listening to Mozart and working with children have provided Michael with the ideas and incentive to write his stories. He spends half his life mucking out sheds with the children, feeding sheep or milking cows; the other half he spends dreaming up and writing stories for children. "For me, the greater part of writing is daydreaming, dreaming the dream of my story until it hatches out - the writing down of it I always find hard. But I love finishing it, then holding the book in my hand and sharing my dream with my readers." Michael received an OBE in December 2006 for his services to literature.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

School Library Journal Review

Gr 4-6 Abandoned at birth, Billy Bunch, now ten, has lived in a string of foster homes. He stutters, does poorly in school, and has no friends, finding consolation in an abandoned churchyard and its environs where he watches birds and other wildlife. It is here that he rescues a deux ex machina in swan shape from some vicious boys, and is miraculously cured of his stutter. He also finds a family of foxes, and when the vixen is run over, Billy rescues one of the cubs and runs away with it (aided and abetted here and there by the d.e.m.). Ultimately, Billy finds a home and a family, the fox returns to the wild, and the d.e.m., ``her mission accomplished at last,'' heads for the swannery. This is overwritten in spots and has other weaknesses to boot (Billy, portrayed as a keen nature observer, fails to notice the swan's bright red leg band for months). As it stands, this plot is too contrived to be convincing. Patricia Manning, Eastchester Public Library, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.