Little Foxes

 By: Michael Morpurgo  

Location: FIC MOR

Genre: Animals

Lara's review:

This was an all right short read.

A boy named Billy is shuffled around various foster homes. He never stays for long. He has stuttering problems until one day, he meets a swan and he saves it and whilst he talks to it he stops stuttering.

He eventually comes across a family of foxes- a vixen and four cubs. The vixen is later killed by a car and he buries it and promises that he will take care of the cubs for her.

They are seen as vermin though and they are gassed and killed- all but one die. So he takes the remaining fox and tries to take it back to his foster home. His foster mother however tells him that if he wants to keep that fox he must leave.

They go on a run through the countryside, avoiding humans until they meet a man on a boat.
He eventually releases the fox and gets a new home, this time it's permament. He ends up living with that man and his wife because they just lost a son that was similar age to him.


There are a lot of lessons in this book -about taking care of nature, trusting people and knowing when it's time to let go and that wild animals can never be pets no matter how hard we try.


It's a lovely short book about nature and bonds that can form between humans and animals.

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.  –––  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."