Fox wakes one morn­ing feel­ing that ​“there was some­thing in the air.” He notices pairs of ani­mals march­ing by in a hur­ry and joins the pro­ces­sion with­out quite know­ing why. After a long jour­ney, includ­ing a night when ​“tooth and claw and fur and feather…lay down to sleep togeth­er” and a detour to free a pair of caged doves in an aban­doned city, fox finds a she-fox wait­ing for him and they enter Noah’s Ark togeth­er. The rhyming text is ser­vice­able, although there are few awk­ward moments as in the forced rhyming of ​“thought” and ​“not” and the sud­den shifts from cou­plets to monorhyme. The inter­nal log­ic is a lit­tle shaky as well: it’s odd that all the oth­er ani­mals, includ­ing the female fox, know what is going on while the fox does not. Noah’s appear­ance at the end of the sto­ry is a sur­prise to the fox, and the sig­nif­i­cance of the ark is not explained in the text. Reid has sup­plied a spring­board from which the reli­gious con­tent can be sup­plied by read­ers who bring their own back­ground knowl­edge with them. This book is best used as a sup­ple­ment to more Torah-tra­di­tion­al retellings, rather than as an intro­duc­tion to the Noah sto­ry. Despite the weak­ness­es of the text, Bar­bara Reid’s sig­na­ture plas­ticine art ele­vates this book to a ​“must have” lev­el. The bright col­ors, the vari­a­tions in tex­ture, the intri­cate detail, the changes in per­spec­tive, and the touch­es of silent humor all make this a book to pore over again and again. For ages 4 – 8.

Read­ing Guide

» Down­load the Fox Walked Alone Read­ing Guide from PJ Library.