Foxcraft – The Mage

The Mage by Inbali Iserles is a fox's-eye adventure for 8 year olds about a young vixen crossing a frozen wilderness alone to find her brother.

What happens

Isla is a fox. The whole book is told by her, in her own words, so a road is a deathway and humans are simply the furless (you pick the vocabulary up within a page or two).

She has come to the Snowlands because she thinks her brother Pirie is somewhere in them. She has no plan beyond that. Her friend Siffrin told her not to go and she went anyway, and now he's on the far side of a river she can't recross.

A blizzard is coming down. Her paws have gone numb. She has used up the silver power she carries, so the foxcraft she's learned is no use to her.

What she has is a chant she used to say with her brother when they were small, which she cannot get out of her head. Mad fox, bad fox, just another dead fox.

She finds a cave and sleeps, and dreams of her Greatma in a meadow, telling her none of it was her fault.

Then three wolves the size of ponies are standing in the mouth of the cave.

This is a proper adventure and it doesn't go soft. The wolves discuss killing Isla in front of her. They wonder aloud whether she's a giant rat or a skinny-legged hare, and knock her about the snow for sport. She talks her way out of it, coldly and cleverly, and there's a wonderful moment where she flatly refuses to beg.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Isla's mother, father and grandmother are dead before this book opens, killed when her family's den was attacked, and she carries that with her on every page. Foxes are hunted, threatened and hurt. It's Warriors territory, so a child who's fine with animals in real danger will be fine here, and a child who isn't really won't.

What to read next

One more thing. This one sits deep in a series and it opens mid-flight, with names and rules already in play. Start with the first Foxcraft book instead, where Isla and Pirie are still play-fighting in the long grass outside the lands of the furless, and she comes home one evening to find the den on fire.