Bestselling author Michael Morpurgo turns his storytelling skills to the drama and tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, illustrated by Michael Foreman. TORO! TORO! follows a young boy growing up in Andalucia, Spain, on a farm rearing bulls for the ring. Antonito hand-rears a little black calf, and the two become firm friends, though the boy doesn’t yet understand what fate awaits the black bulls – the corrida, and death. Once he learns the horrors of the bullfight, he sets Paco, the black bull, free and rides with him into the hills, where they witness the bombing of their village – it is 1936, and the Spanish Civil War has begun. Antonito cannot go back: his family and the farm are destroyed, and Paco has bolted, wild with fright. He decides to remain in the hills, where he falls in with Resistance fighters, and during the war he hears campfire stories of a wonderful black bull who becomes a symbol of freedom for them all. Could it really be Paco? No one has ever actually seen him. After the war, working as a muleteer in the mountains, Antonito falls asleep and dreams of Paco – and wakes the next morning to find hoof prints on the ground beside him… A delightful story, full of nostalgia and drama, told in the author’s own inimitable style and illustrated by Michael Foreman.
ISBN 13: 9780007107186
Author: Michael Morpurgo
