The Butterfly Lion

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It takes you on a rich journey of adventure,loneliness,loss,sadness,hope,love,friendship,determination and joy. They have a wonderful companionship but things take a turn for the worst when Bertie is sent to boarding school in England and his father sells the cub to a French circus owner. The contrast of loneliness and companionship, of the horrors of war and the joys of love and friendship are, in my opinion, what make his stories stick. It is a story told in the first person by a young boy who runs away from his school lonely and sad and meets the old lady who relates the story of her husband from long before.

His little white lion went with him everywhere, and at the end of each day they would watch the sun go down together. They have three farms in Devon, Wales and Gloucestershire, open to inner city school children who come to stay and work with the animals.e For Berite looking out into the African bush and seeing the tiger for the very first time or his first night alone in the boarding school so very far away from anything he was familiar with. The tale follows the young boy who meets a number of people, the most important of which is an old lady who tells the boy a story of her (and her husbands) life, this is where the lion also comes in to it. There are so many benefits from listening to a story in any format, from developing listening skills and quite concentration to fostering imagination and visualization techniques. The inclusion of the war adds a touch of history and would interest boys if they can get past the front cover.

How the story of the two ends, how the old woman comes to know of it, and how all of it ties back into WW1, you'll have to discover for yourselves. A lyrical and moving tale of a young boy growing up in Africa, and his lifelong friendship with a white lion. Morpurgo has never written a lovelier story and the simple drawings of Christian Birmingham, an illustrator i love, really grace the whole thing. The book is about a boy who skips shcool and goes to an old womens house and the old women tells a story about a young boy. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.The book was adapted into a stage play by Daniel Buckroyd of the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, which toured the UK in 2014. The hint at the depression of Bertie's mum is explored through a child's eyes, seeing his mum unhappy, inactive and experiencing mood swings. But knowing how much the two cared about one another just made it worse (or better, from a storyteller's point of view). During the reading of the book there was the puzzle of whether or not the lion seen from the window by the boy and the old lady is real - is it to be a magical fantasy book? To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

They are inseparable until Bertie is sent to boarding school far away in England and the lion is sold to a circus. Many years later, Bertie was fighting for England in the Great War in France, when he saw a poster with a white lion on it advertising a nearby circus. The book is full of descriptive writing and emotion that pulls you into the book and allows you to feel like you are actually there. It always deals with the issue of loneliness, no doubt experienced by many children, especially those who are enduring life at a boarding school where they might be a relative outsider.When the lion dies, Bertie and Millie carve a lion out of the chalk in the hillside in memorial, before Bertie dies himself. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. I add my voice to the majority of commentators who rate this book highly for children of all ages, even into their old age!