Pax, Journey Home

Sara Pennypacker's Pax, Journey Home is a story for 10 year olds that picks up a year after Pax, with a boy and his fox now living very separate lives.

What happens

Peter is thirteen and lives with Vola, building himself a little log cabin on her land. He's also trying very hard never to love anything again.

He's lost his mum, his dad and his fox. So whenever a memory of Pax sneaks up on him, he makes himself replay the day he found him as a kit and imagine walking away instead. It's heartbreaking, because you can see exactly why.

Then Vola offers him half her land, so he'll always have a home. He panics and says something to her he can't take back. He pushes away his best friend Ben too.

So he makes a plan. He'll join the Junior Water Warriors, a group of young volunteers cleaning up water poisoned in the war, near the town where he grew up. He'll take his dad's ashes to his mum's grave. And then he won't come back.

The chapters swap between Peter and Pax, and the fox chapters are just lovely. Pax has a mate called Bristle now, and three tiny kits. The little vixen refuses to stay in the den and even follows her dad's trail (when she falls asleep on his chest, you'll melt).

Pax's chapters feel like being inside an animal. Water smells of everything it has run past. And humans who bring war are simply "war-sick". When people in army clothes turn up at the reservoir, Pax knows their den isn't safe anymore and decides he must find his family a new home.

It's worth knowing that this one is sad in places. In the very first chapter Pax comes across dead baby animals. Later an owl swoops down on one of his kits, and Peter's memories include a dead vixen and her kits. His dad has died in the war before the story starts, and Peter's grief is there from the very start.

A child who finds animals in danger, or a parent's death, very hard might want to wait. But if your reader is ready for a sad book with a huge heart, there's lots of warmth too. Vola's peach pie, for one. And a gruff grandfather who turns up to dinner with his hair combed.

If your reader hasn't read Pax yet, start there, because this one takes for granted that you know how it ends.

What to read next

And if they're after another fox trying to get the animals he loves to safety, try The Animals of Farthing Wood. Fox, Badger and their whole wood have to find a new home when humans fill in the last pond.