SCARY STORIES FOR YOUNG FOXES

New foxes experience new horrors.

The travails of Mia and Uly in Heidicker’s Newbery Honor novel, Scary Stories for Young Foxes (2019), have become cautionary, inspirational folklore for a new vulpine generation. Three young foxes come across an injured cousin, who spins them tales of fresh horror. Readers don’t have to be familiar with the first volume to catch the thread of this sequel, and while there are some carry-over references (the yellow stench of rabies, a propagandized version of Beatrix Potter’s appearance), the terrors here are new and mostly a product of civilization. Oleo, né O-370, is a fox with all the wildness bred out of him, and he and his family live in the relative safety of wire cages, heated by lamps, until they are turned into fox-fur coats. When Oleo escapes, he meets a family of orphaned, urban foxes whom he enlists in a quest to save his captured kin. Heidicker’s writing continues to shine, his poetic language depicting scenarios that will be too much for sensitive readers but will more than satisfy those with a taste for gore and tragedy. At times the action becomes more burden than forward momentum, but on the whole, this is a worthy follow-up, with a triumphant end attempting to answer the eternal quandary of safety versus freedom. Final art not seen.

A fur-raising adventure.