The Midnight Fox

Okay, I love Betsy Byars.  Love, love, love Betsy Byars, she's one of my favorite children's authors ever.  (Yes, in case you're wondering... I have been reading children's books all year so far... these are the ones you find in the "young readers" category, novels suitable for third graders to read.  Or, as was my creepy case, kindergartners.)  But anyway, I just think she's swell.  The reason I love to read her is that she writes exactly as I think, and consequently, exactly as I write.  It makes me believe that my writing style might not be unreadable after all.  (Snide comments about my writing style will be ignored.)  What I mean is, she just starts writing from inside her characters' head, and then whatever tangeant their brain would go off on, that's suddenly in the story.  So there's a lot of "one time we played this game" or "it reminded me of the time that" type of things.  

Anyway, The Midnight Fox is not a book that I found early- it was one of those that I never read, never bought, never really heard of for a pretty long time.  Somehow it showed up in the pile of "keep it or don't" books, so I had to read it to see if it was worth keeping.  I decided it was.  It's not a spectacular book or even one of Byars' better ones, but it was a pretty good read.  It's your typical let's-learn-something-about-ourselves story, but not preachy.  (She's very good at that, by the way.)  City kid goes to live on a farm for a summer, sees and falls in love with a black fox, of course the same black fox his uncle is bent on killing because it steals chickens.  I won't go any further...  you do the math.  There's only one way this story can end, and guess what?  It ends that way.  But it's fun to read as you're going along, even though you know where you're going.  It's not Shakespeare, but it's entertaining.  So I call it worthy of my shelves, and a good one for kids (or adults who read like kids) to read.