BLACKBERRY FOX

Two children embark on a once-in-a-lifetime quest in this translated title from Germany.

When London girl Portia Beale visits her aunts—Rose and her partner, Bramble—in the countryside of North Wales, she isn’t expecting the adventure of a lifetime. Really, following the fox who appears one day seems like a harmless thing to do. But when the animal leads her to a mysterious door in a stone wall, Portia can’t help seeing whether there’s a magical world on the other side. Soon Rose and Ben Rees, a quiet local boy, are racing to close the door that Portia so innocently opened, beginning a quest to save both the human and faerie worlds from the powerful Gray King, whose sinister fog threatens to suck the memories and life from all it touches. Pulling characters and inspiration from a variety of sources, including Welsh mythology and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this fantasy relies on classic quest tropes as it meanders to the inevitable culminating battle between good and evil. The dual perspectives follow Portia’s and Ben’s journeys, which diverge at times, but this structure sadly doesn’t speed up the slow pacing. Both protagonists have strong backstories, yet their motivations fail to inspire an emotional connection. It’s unclear whether the unfortunate use of problematic terms such as spirit animal and chop, chop reflect connotations in the original text or were introduced in the translation process. All characters read white.

A traditional fantasy for patient readers.