Sara Pennypacker
Illustrated by Jon Klassen
277 pp., hardcover with jacket $16.99 (our price $13.59)
The title of this wonderful book for young (and not so young)
readers refers to the fox’s name, but you know immediately this book is not
about peace, but war. The war here is not only the outside, inexplicable
destruction of all good things, but the personal war the young protagonist is
having within himself. There is no good side or bad side in this war, just a
fierce and heartbreaking struggle.
Peter is twelve years old, walking the ridge between
childhood and adulthood. He lives with his father, an angry and wounded man
whose love for his son is overshadowed by the death of Peter’s mother, and by
his belief in his duty to be a soldier when his country calls, which it inevitably does. Peter’s comfort
comes from his pet fox, whom he’d rescued as a two-week-old kit, several years
before. Pax’s mother had been killed, and his siblings had perished. Peter
becomes his provider, protector, and brother. They become inseparable, “two but
not two.”
But in fact, Peter and Pax are separated. When war
intervenes, Peter is sent to live hundreds of miles away with his grandfather,
who, like his father, is reticent and angry. Worse, he is forced by his father
to deceive Pax and abandon him alongside a deserted road. It’s time the pet fox
were wild again, his father commands. Peter, being a child, is powerless to
disobey. He is a soldier in a different war. The novel eloquently explores the
worry a child feels that he has no control over his own life, or even his own character.
The apple never falls far from the tree, as Peter’s grandfather likes to say. Peter
wonders if he is doomed to grow up angry and distant like his father and
grandfather.
The deception of Pax gnaws at Peter. Leaving the fox was not right, no matter what
the adults around him say. He knows that he is not where he’s supposed to be,
so he fills his backpack with basic supplies and leaves his grandfather’s home in
the middle of the night. He will find Pax and keep him safe. He will always be
where he’s supposed to be.
The chapters alternate between Peter and Pax, taking the
reader along on their parallel journeys as each struggles to find the other.
Peter is aided in his search by a reclusive, one-legged woman, a former medic
in the ever-present war, who lives in the wilderness and avoids all human
interaction. By the time Peter stumbles upon her, he has a badly broken foot. Vola
is a woodworker, and makes him a set of crutches to use after setting the
broken bone. She feeds him, and helps him gain the strength he will need to
continue on his journey, but she also opens his mind and teaches him to trust
again. Before he departs, Peter offers Vola a gift of his own.
Pax, meanwhile, is gradually welcomed into a small family—a
brother and sister fox—who show him how to survive in the wild. He understands
his boy’s act was false, but also trusts that Peter would never intentionally
hurt him. He never loses faith that they will find each other. When he
successfully hunts for the first time in his life, he is filled with wild
delight, shedding his tameness for the first time. Likewise, Peter’s time with
Vola releases a sort of wildness in his being, allowing him to feel the
emotions he has tried hard to repress. Peter tells Vola he will not be angry,
not be like his father. She laughs. “We all own a beast called anger. It can
serve us: many good things come of anger at bad things; many unjust things are
made just. But first we all have to figure out how to civilize it.”
This is a book about war and its devastation on the natural
world as well as the human. It’s about trust, and learning to trust oneself as
well as others. And it’s about the intense, unbreakable loyalty a child shares
with an animal, whether wild or domestic (or both). Peter asks Vola if her
raccoon is wild or tame and she “waves the words off as if they were gnats.”
She simply leaves the porch door open and lets the animal come and go. And she
asks Peter as he settles into the hammock on the porch his first night: “You
staying out here on the porch. What do you suppose that makes you? Wild or
tame?”
