Shadow Fox

The voice of Shadow, a wild and lonely fox, tells this latest poignant story from Carlie Sorosiak, Shadow Fox. At the heart of the book (and it is a big heart) is his relationship with the unconventional human girl, Bee.

To begin with, they are drawn into an uneasy alliance by an inexplicable connection that neither has chosen and that confuses them both. Together, they discover magical islands hidden behind the ripples of the Great Lakes, encounter dark dangers and are plunged into a desperate mission to save a whole ecosystem under threat.  Little by little, the mysterious connection of convenience transforms their bickering into mutual devotion, until they choose each other as their place to belong.

The narration has a surface simplicity, like the fox's main concerns (food and safety). He describes rather than explains events in relatively short sentences and there is plenty of direct speech. Make no mistake, though, this is a fox with a wide vocabulary and a poetic turn of phrase: he suppresses his whimpers and allows himself a haughty twitch of his tail; the ground heartbeats to the brush of his paw and he skitters over cliffs to hide himself in sky-milk (fog).

In class, many parts of the story would make good models for writing. Carlie Sorosiak has a gift for creating non-human narrators and reviewing the oddities and imperfections of the world of humans from an animal's perspective. It gives her writing an originality and warmth that will appeal to fans of animal books like those by Hannah Gold or Gill Lewis.

240 pages / Reviewed by Louisa Farrow, teacher

Suggested Reading Age 9+