Little Manfred by Michael Morpurgo - Review

Recently we got all my books unpacked in the new house and arranged into their genres on the new shelves in the back bedroom. Well, two of the bookshelves were new but one was in our old house and one of the other shelves we had is now in my craft room, but they are all in new places, that's for sure. This bedroom is not huge but it's got a single bed in it and my work desk, and now it also has over a thousand books. In fact, let me show you the pictures of the shelves:

Here we've got literary fiction on two shelves, a bunch of books about music, and then a bunch of non fiction

Here's all the YA - these books are all double shelved as are the literary fiction ones at the top

These books are all crime at the top then more non fiction in the middle, my cousin helped to rearrange these 

These are all classics and stuff, under my work desk, because I do want to keep them but I don't need to access them often. Some of these belonged to my grandparents! 

And here there's children's lit and middle grade at the top and then two shelves of books that I know are LGBTQ+, no matter what other genre they might fit into. I like to have them all together! I sure do have a lot of them!

Anyway, with all the books unpacked there are more than a thousand, so I officially do have a whole entire library all of my own! Lee owns some of the music books and I haven't pictured all his stupid Viz annuals, but he mostly reads digitally so doesn't own a lot of books. It's been lovely to be reunited with all my books, and I've been trying to pick out things that I really want to read but haven't seen in ages. With that, I picked up Little Manfred by Michael Morpurgo. 

I don't think I've read anything by him before, but of course I have heard of him. I'm really not sure where I picked this book up from, but I feel like I've had it a while. It's a cute little novella and I would recommend it to any chapter book young reader. 

The main characters of the book are Charley, who is 12, and Alex, her brother, who is seven. The book is set in 1966 when England have just won the World Cup. The kids live on a farm and often take off to the beach to walk their dog, Manfred. He is named after a little toy dog that their mum had, called Little Manfred. The kids are walking on the beach and shout the dog, and nearby two men overhear them. It turns out that one of them was on the ship Bismarck when it went down, when two thousand men were left to drown, but he and Manfred were rescued by HMS Dorsetshire but then became prisoners of war and eventually lived on the farm where the children live and where their mother grew up. 

This is a really cute book and I really liked it and even learnt some history in the meantime! I'm giving it four out of five.