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THE AMAZING STORY OF ADOLPHUS TIPS by Michael Morpurgo

THE AMAZING STORY OF ADOLPHUS TIPS

by Michael Morpurgo

Pub Date: April 1st, 2006
ISBN: 0-439-79661-X
Publisher: Scholastic

Lily Tregenza’s diary entries provide an engaging glimpse of the changes wrought upon her family farm and small village on the Devon coast during the months leading up to D-Day. Her father is off repairing engines in the African desert, her new classmate Barry is an evacuee from London, the village is full of Yankee soldiers and her cat, Tips, keeps disappearing. Most dramatically, the villages and farms are evacuated as the Allies take over the beaches to practice in preparation for landing in France. Morpurgo’s voice for 12-year-old Lily is clear and believable. A framing story for Lily’s journal—that she, in her 60s, sent the pages about these months in 1943 and 1944 to her 12-year-old grandson—gives a sweet closing to Lily’s account of her friendship with two kind American soldiers. Readers drawn to the wonderful green eyes of the cat on the cover may find their disappointment that this isn’t really a cat story assuaged by the considerable charm of Lily’s narrative. (Fiction. 8-11)