Amber: The Story of a Red Fox

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

In previous books, Woods has connected young readers with the lives of a
deer mouse, coyote, beaver, raccoon, and polar bear, and now he turns to
a red fox. As with his earlier works of realistic animal fiction, Woods
uses a chronological approach that tracks the animal from its birth
until it is able to live independently as an adult. Amber is the
youngest, the smallest, and the only female among five kits born in
April in an abandoned woodchuck burrow on the north shore of Lake Huron,
and readers vicariously experience Amber’s life until December 25 of
the same year.

Woods unobtrusively provides readers with a great deal of information
about the red fox, its behaviours, and habits, and he does so without
romanticizing the animal’s life. Foxes are both predators and prey
(two of Amber’s siblings are killed, one carried off by an eagle and
another caught in a human’s trap). The book’s too-abrupt ending
suggests that Woods apparently expected that his young readers would
understand that the male fox Amber encounters will become her mate,
thereby renewing the fox life cycle.

Celia Godkin provides 10 full-page scratch-board illustrations, each of
which freezes an exciting moment in the action, such as Kit’s being
confronted by a dog and a shotgun-toting farmer when she is trapped in a
henhouse. Additionally, each of the book’s 10 chapters is introduced
by a small black-and-white illustration that hints at the chapter’s
subject matter. Recommended.