I read Fox 8<\/i> over the course of a single day, starting it on my morning commute and finishing it on my evening commute, and aw, what a sweet\/funny\/sad\/hopeful little book this is. It’s a fable narrated by a fox who has learned human language by listening to a woman read bedtime stories to her kids; he’s entranced by “the Yuman voice, making werds” (3) and by human achievements generally: houses, cars, stereos, malls, all the things people can build. But it turns out people, and the things they build, can cause problems: a mall being built disrupts Fox 8’s habitat, and when he and a friend set out in search of food, things go tragically wrong thanks to human cruelty and callousness, after which Fox 8 gets lost and finds himself wandering the world, unable to find his den-mates. He doesn’t give up hope, though, and after managing to find a new life for himself, he ends the book by offering a piece of advice to humankind, or I guess I should say Yumankind: “If you want your Storys to end happy, try being niser” (49).<\/p>\n
I really like Fox 8’s narrative voice, phonetic spelling and awkward syntax and all, and found so many things in this book really charming: how bothered Fox 8 is by the “fawlse” depictions of foxes, bears, and owls in the stories he hears the mom reading to her kids; his conversation with a dog in the mall parking lot; his tendency to daydream. I also like Chelsea Cardinal’s illustrations a whole lot: her line drawings, with the foxes in red and most other stuff in black, complement the text really nicely. (You can see some of those drawings<\/a> on her Instagram: I love the one with the tree on the left page and the foxes on the right, and that gorgeous two-page spread of Fox 8 under a cloud-filled sky, surrounded by grass and trees, with the city off in the distance.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I read Fox 8 over the course of a single day, starting it on my morning commute and finishing it on my evening commute, and aw, what a sweet\/funny\/sad\/hopeful little book this is. It’s a fable narrated by a fox who has learned human language by listening to a woman read bedtime stories to her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}