By Sara Pennypacker
A boy and his pet fox are split apart by war, and you follow both of them home.
Peter has raised Pax, a fox, since Pax was a tiny kit, and the two of them belong to each other completely. Then war comes, Peter's father enlists, and almost the first thing his father does is make Peter let the fox go. They drive out to a road far from anywhere, Peter sets Pax down in the grass, and the car pulls away without him. Peter makes it as far as his grandfather's house before he can't stand it another minute. He turns around and starts walking back — three hundred miles, on his own, to find one fox. From there the book splits in two. One chapter you're on the road with Peter. The next you're in the woods with Pax, who has to learn fast how to be a wild animal.
What makes it impossible to put down is the trade in the telling. You get a chapter with Peter, then a chapter with the fox, and you spend every one of them worried sick about whichever one you just had to leave behind. It also reads fast, because the chapters are short and the writing is spare. A child can get through these pages a year or two before they're actually ready for how much the story asks of them, which is exactly why it sits at the end of the trail and not earlier. It doesn't cushion a single thing, and it trusts an older reader with an ending that stays honest instead of turning happy.