Little Foxes

Michael Morpurgo's Little Foxes is a story for 9 year olds about a lonely boy who finds the one place in the world where he belongs.

What happens

Billy Bunch arrived at a police station one winter night as a baby in a box, with a note asking someone to look after him. Nobody ever claimed him. Ten years and a lot of foster homes later, he lives with Aunty May on the tenth floor of a block of flats.

Aunty May nags about muddy clothes and the price of washing powder. At school Billy stutters, and his teacher makes him read aloud anyway. It's hard to read those early pages without wanting to give him a hug.

But Billy has a secret. Behind a wire fence at the edge of the estate there's a ruined chapel, an old graveyard and a canal. The other kids think it's haunted. Billy calls it his Wilderness.

He knows every bird there. Owls in the chapel wall, wagtails on the gravestones and, best of all, a pair of kingfishers. When a gang of older boys throws stones at a young swan, Billy wades into the canal to save her. And then something lovely happens to his stutter (no spoilers, but you'll feel it).

Later he finds a vixen's den with four cubs, and one bold cub who watches him right back.

The Wilderness feels so real. You can almost smell the fox den and feel the ice on the canal. And Billy's small, stubborn kindnesses really get to you. He smuggles corned beef out of Aunty May's larder, even though he hates the stuff. He invents dizzy spells so he can skip school and feed the cubs!

Worth knowing before you hand it over

There's quite a lot of sadness here and some of it involves animals. The boys stoning the swan is upsetting. A young kingfisher dies in the hard winter, and Billy finds the vixen dead in the road after she's hit by a car. Billy buries her himself and promises to look after her cubs.

So if your reader is very tender about animals getting hurt, this might be one to share. If they're the sort of child who notices every bird in the garden, though, Billy will feel like a friend.

What to read next

If they love Billy, try Morpurgo's The Butterfly Lion next. It starts with a lonely boy who runs away from boarding school and meets an old lady whose story about a lion takes him all the way to Africa.