Scary Stories for Young Foxes, by Christian McKay Heidicker

When my children were young, we would sometimes make a den of the bed, and they would be young foxes.  They wanted me to be the mother fox (which of course makes sense), but I very much wanted to be a baby fox too, because the dramatic tension and heart-wrenching anxiety of the baby foxes waiting for their mama to come back to them is so much more interesting than the "mother fox keeps her babies safe and nothing can hurt them" story.  Especially when you are stuck being the mother fox.

So the point of that little anecdote is that I was utterly primed to read Scary Stories for Young Foxes, by Christian McKay Heidicker (Henry Holt, July 2019), in which mama foxes fail to protect their babies and no den is safe and warm.  It's a series of terrifying episodes in the lives of two young foxes, framed as stories being told to a litter of young fox kids who came to the storytellers cave looking for thrills...and found them!

Mia was a happy little fox kit with a mother fox who loved her and a wise vixen who was teaching her and her litter mates how to Fox.  But when Miss Vix and the other kits become infected with a terrifying sickness. Mia's mom whisks her far away from her home and her siblings, much to her confusion and dismay.

Uly, the second young fox, also had a mother who loved him, but his wasn't a happy childhood.  He has only three good legs, and his sisters bully him, and his father wants him dead.

Uly and Mia both find themselves alone, with no mothers to look after them, and lots of horrifying experiences in front of them.  There are dangers, both the quotidian dangers of life in the wild, and the particular dangers posed by adversaries.  Never, for instance, has Beatrix Potter seemed so utterly monstrous, and Uly's father is utterly terrifing, sort of a cross between the father in The Shinning and the worst abusive father/husband/cult leader you can imagine.

The descriptions, both of the horrible things and the natural world, are incredibly vivid, and beautifully fox-point-of-view.   Seeing Mia and Uly forging a relationship of mutual trust and respect is lovely too.  Uly has been bullied by his sisters all his life, and his mother was somewhat overprotective, and I liked seeing Mia just  matter-of-factly expecting him to do things, like swim and hunt, that he had no idea he was capable of, and him gradually developing more confidence.  I was a little fussed by a book having Beatrix Potter, badgers, alligators, and what seemed to be rabies all in the same place, but I got over it.

The book is comprised of episodes in the horrible adventures of Mia and Uly, separated by the framing device of quick peeks at the young kits listening to the stories, but they flow smoothly from one to the next, so the ultimate effect is of  a single story (with a mercifully happy ending).  And though the things that happen to the young foxes are very scary indeed, they keep surviving them, building up confidence on the reader's part that they will make it through. And so once you make it to then end, there's no feeling of terror anymore, just some residual sadness, and a sense of resliance and life going on (as is found in many nature documentaries...).

So though it's scary, it's middle grade scary, an especially good read for kids in safe dens of their own.