Reviews of a number of the novels of Maia Wojciechowska contain phrases like 'a blatant failure', 'too blurred to be effective', 'succeeds only in tediously preaching', and 'the pretentiously allegorical parades of stereotypes'. These are hardly the sentiments to encourage readership and there is a sense in which Wojciechowska is her own worst enemy. It is not too fanciful to suggest that her personal life has been so exotic that she finds it very diff...

["Shadow of a Bull"] is disarmingly simple; yet nuances of feeling continually break through, and their subtlety astonishes the adult reader who supposes that a book for children is necessarily … childish. "Shadow of a Bull" is the story of Manolo Olivar, age 9 when the tale opens, and 11 when it concludes. He is the son of the man who had been the greatest bullfighter in Spain. (p. 103)

["Shadow of a Bull"] is about a little Spanish town whose heart is the market place and whose soul is the bull ring. The Maia (Teresa) Wojciechowska 1927– Photograph by Milton Ackoffhero—or anti-hero—is the ten-year-old son of a famous bull-fighter. In the main square is a huge statue of his father, and in the cemetery, marking his father's grave, is another. The boy was three when his father was kil...

["Shadow of a Bull"] deals with fear in the heart of Manolo Olivar, a 12-year-old Spanish boy, son of a great bullfighter who had been killed in the ring. The book is tight,… done by a writer whose native language is not English. Miss Wojciechowska knows bullfighting and, more important, she is a magnificent writer. In spare, economical prose she makes one feel, see, smell the heat, endure the hot Andalusian sun and shows one the sand and glare of the bullring. Above all, she lifts the ...