Inbali Iserles’s Foxcraft The Elders is a tense animal adventure for 8 year olds about a fox cub crossing wild country on her own.<\/p>\n
Isla has nobody. Her family are dead and her brother Pirie is lost somewhere in the Wildlands, and all she has to follow is a bond between them that lets her hear his voice inside her head.<\/p>\n
This is the middle book of a trilogy and it opens where the first one stopped, so your reader will want to start at the beginning.<\/p>\n
It begins with a scream. A grown fox has caught his paw between rocks in a stream and the rain is bringing the water up over his shoulders.<\/p>\n
Isla nearly walks on. Her Greatma’s rule was trust no one but family, and she repeats it to herself like a charm. Then she goes in anyway.<\/p>\n
The fox she frees is Haiki, who talks constantly, who flatters two hungry dogs into wandering off after imaginary rabbits, and who wants Isla to come with him to find the Elders.<\/p>\n
That is the question the whole book sits on. Isla has already been lied to once, badly, by a fox she thought was her friend. So every time Haiki is kind, you are wondering.<\/p>\n
The writing is properly sensory. Foxes here have their own words for things, the Snarl for the city, the furless for people, a brush for a tail, and after a page or two you stop noticing and just read.<\/p>\n
Foxcraft itself is lovely. Slimmering makes you invisible. Karakking lets you throw another creature’s call across a field. Isla is only half good at either, which is far more interesting than if she were brilliant.<\/p>\n
Worth knowing before you hand it over. Isla’s parents and her grandmother are dead when the book opens and she thinks about them often. A man with a gun fires at the two cubs on a mountainside, twice, and Haiki says plainly afterwards that the man wanted his fur.<\/p>\n
There is real dread in the middle of it too, in a dream of a forest where nothing green grows and the mushrooms burn your tongue.<\/p>\n
So this is not one for a child who finds animals in danger upsetting. If yours likes animal stories where the animals are wild rather than cosy, and asks for the next one straight away, it is right in that groove.<\/p>\n
Start with the first Foxcraft book, where Isla and Pirie are still play fighting in the grass outside their den.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Inbali Iserles’s Foxcraft The Elders is a tense animal adventure for 8 year olds about a fox cub crossing wild country on her own. Isla has nobody. Her family are dead and her brother Pirie is lost somewhere in the Wildlands, and all she has to follow is a bond between them that lets her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10823,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":7454,"lr_next_read_anchor":"the first Foxcraft book","lr_seo_hook":"A fox cub alone in the Wildlands, with only her brother's voice to follow."},"book_tag":[27],"age_group":[26],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[397],"class_list":["post-7455","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-fantasy-books","age_group-books-for-8-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-inbali-iserles"],"yoast_title":"Foxcraft – The Elders by Inbali Iserles | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A fox cub alone in the Wildlands, with only her brother's voice to follow. For ages 8+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n