The Silver Swan - Softcover

Michael Morpurgo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552546143 ISBN 13: 9780552546140

Publisher: Random House Childs Paperbacks, 2001

Synopsis

A boy living by a Scottish loch sees a beautiful silver swan land on the water. She remains at the loch, mates and there are soon five cygnets too. When the snowy Winter sets in, all the birds and animals around the loch must scavenge desperately for food. The fox also has cubs to feed.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Morpurgo is one of today's most popular and critically acclaimed children's writers, author of KENSUKE'S KINGDOM and THE WRECK OF THE ZANZIBAR amongst many other titles. He has won a multitude of prizes including the Children's Book Award, the Smarties Prize and the Writer's Guild Award.

From Publishers Weekly:

Pooling their considerable talents once again, Morpurgo and Birmingham (previously teamed for Wombat Goes Walkabout) craft a superb picture book about a boy, a special swan and the sometimes cruel realities of nature. After a female swan arrives on a lake one moonlit night, a solitary farmboy who lives nearby befriends her, watching through the seasons as she finds a mate and starts a family. An unusually long winter leaves a family of foxes near starvation, however, and in the end the boy is helpless to save his beloved swan from an attack. "I knew the precise moment she died," he observes. "I knew it because she sang it." Morpurgo's sharp observations trace the cycles of the natural world with a bittersweet beauty, never anthropomorphizing the animals yet conveying a deep respect for the ways of their world. His words take wing with Birmingham's pastels. Plying light and shadow to echo the story's shifting moods, the artist blends and blurs colors in a series of breathtaking impressionistic images and unusual perspectives (the newly arrived male greeting the boy's swan is reflected in the boy's eyes; readers see only the boy's image on the surface of the water as he spies on the newborn cygnets swimming behind their mother). An awe-inspiring and poignant glimpse of nature's inner workings. Ages 4-8. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Childs Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0552546143
• ISBN 13: 9780552546140
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 32