47 pages • 1 hour read
Michael MorpurgoA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Michael Morpurgo is both the author of the novel and the novel’s protagonist. In the novel’s first-person perspective, an adult Morpurgo recalls the events of his childhood in Wiltshire. Morpurgo’s childhood is in turn a frame story for the embedded narrative about Bertie, Millie, and their white lion.
Morpurgo was inspired to write the novel by several real-world encounters and events (see Background); however, the novel itself is fiction.
As a boy, Michael is, “more miserable than I had ever been before” (8) at the novel’s opening. He is stuck at boarding school in Wiltshire, away from home, his mother, and London. He faces a bully named Basher Beaumont, and a teacher named Mr. Carter, who tortures him for poor spelling. Michael decides to run away and catch the train to London. He flees in the rain on a Sunday afternoon, but a car startles him through a gate and into the yard of Millie Andrews, who invites him to tea. She tells him a long story about her life with Bertie and the lion, and then returns him to school where he learns that the real Millie Andrews died roughly a decade earlier.
By Michael Morpurgo
Action & Adventure
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Animals in Literature
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Coming-of-Age Journeys
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Friendship
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Juvenile Literature
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Loyalty & Betrayal
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Memory
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Mortality & Death
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Valentine's Day Reads: The Theme of Love
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War
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