The story begins in the present, with a boy running away from school. However it is the themes of friendship, loyalty and overcoming the odds that children will identify with most in this wide-ranging tale.
Told through recollections of a childhood friend, we are plunged into the past to learn about Bertie’s time growing up in South Africa, his transferral to an English boarding school and subsequently his role as a soldier in the First World War. How different would life be if your best friend ware a lion? This is just one of the questions explored by Michael Morpurgo in The Butterfly Lion. Ages 8-12.Friendship, war and separation are some of the big themes that children can explore while reading Michael Morpurgo's The Butterfly Lion. But unless readers can picture ""the famous White Horse on the hillside at Uffington"" (an enormous, ancient image carved into chalky ground), they will have difficulty imagining an adult Bertie and his wife carving out a similar picture of the white lion or of blue butterflies alighting on it en masse to ""drink on the chalk face""-concepts critical to the book's conclusion. Magic enters the novel at an appropriate moment, and the conclusion is sweet. How did it come to be there? The old woman tells him the remarkable story of Bertie, who as a boy found a white lion in Africa and was later obliged to give him to a European circus. There, fed delicious scones, he looks out the window upon the hillside to see a huge shape of a lion, switching from white to blue. and semolina pudding""), only to meet an old woman who invites him in for tea. A boy runs away from his strict boarding school (""It was a diet of Latin and stew and rugby and detentions.
The story, about a boy who gives his white lion immortality, moves gracefully through frequent switches from past to present, from first to third person, from the English countryside to pre-WWI South Africa. Winner of a Smarties Gold Medal, Morpurgo's (The Wreck of the Zanzibar) cozy, well-executed British novel may not survive the jump across the ocean-the climax depends on a casual reference likely to be lost on American readers.
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