Title: An Eagle in the Snow
Author: Michael Morpurgo
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 274
Rating: 9/10
Michael Morpurgo – An Eagle in the Snow
Disclaimer: While I aim to be unbiased, I received a copy of this for free to review.
This book was cute, and a quick and easy read – I powered through it in a day. It’s set during the Second World War, when a young boy and his mother are leaving Coventry by train and they come under attack from German aircraft. The train pulls into a dark tunnel and stays there to wait for the attack to pass – in the meantime, a strange man tells the boy and his mother a story, about a young soldier in the First World War.
In many ways, this reminds me of a book that I read a little while back – Snowbound, by Bram Stoker. In that book, travellers pass the time by telling each other stories, in a similar plot device that we see here. In both cases, it was used to great effect, and although I didn’t give this a ten because I thought it was a little cliche in places, it was still technically very well written, as well as well executed with the incorporation of some fantastic illustrations. And besides, this book is designed to be read by parents and kids, and to teach them about the futility of war from an early age, without exposing them too much to its horrors. There’s a lot of history to be learned here, too.
So go out there and buy this book – it’s lots of fun, and you won’t regret it.
Michael Morpurgo
