This was a hard enough challenge trying to find a book! When putting it out there for help on picking, most options, if not all, were about witches. I figured this was almost too easy (even though as my sort of sister in law suggested, I could have just used the excuse to re-read Harry Potter!)
I decided to try and find a book about either a wardrobe or a lion. You’d be surprised how hard this is! I wanted proper lions, not figurative ones or just the word in a title. I then found the perfect book..
The Butterfly Lion by Michael Morpurgo
If you don’t recognise the title, the author may ring a bell. He has written many books including War Horse, which is now a movie and west end production.
With this knowledge and because I initially found the book online, when I went to the bookshop to buy it, I was shocked to find it in the children section for ages 8-12! I hadn’t realised it would be such a young reader’s book!
However, it was still a very well written story and had me gripped to the end.
We follow a school boy that discovers an old house with an old lady inside. She tells him her husbands story as he had run away from the same school as a child. Before which he had saved and adopted a lion cub in Africa.
The way the author wrote about the heartaches of a depressed mother, a child that loses their only friend and the multiple perils of a world war, was in a way that even a child would be able to grasp. As an adult, I may have felt it too keenly as I was balling by the end!
I loved finding this book and intend to buy Morpurgo’s other works so my future children can enjoy the beautiful storytelling. Hopefully it will inspire them to love reading like me! 🤓
My next challenge is…
A book that Everyone is reading
