The Taken

Meadow15 - This review is pretty late, but oh well. I found Foxcraft a decent read. I felt that it got confusing and slow at times, especially between large, dramatic events where the only thing to fill in the gaps is detailed descriptions of surroundings, which get tiring, distracting, and downright boring to read. When it wasn't slow, it was too quickly-paced, with one dramatic event following another with little rest in between, which took away the element of surprise and eventually began to bore me. It could almost be called a drama-conga-line, just one thing after another. The magical elements could be interesting and believable at times, but as the story developed and the plot thickened, they began to use magic at every turn to solve pretty much every problem without any real consequences other than momentary fatigue, which seems to abandon them whenever they need to go fast. It would be more interesting to see them come up with unique ways of solving her problems, rather than "Oh, I'll just use some fox magic!" It would also add to the story if some of the foxes and other characters that she meets find her later. While I get that she's in a large city and seeing the animals again would be unlikely, at least seeing one character again would make the story more interesting rather than several come-and-go characters. Most characters that she meets are described in great detail and given some personality - then never seen again. The fox-vocab also tended to confuse me sometimes, especially near the beginning of the story, where it was hard to figure out what things were and I had to really think. The "Wildway" was a bit tough to figure out at first, as well as "manglers". Other than that, Foxcraft is a great read for readers ages 8-10 - a little out of my age range, but oh well. However, if you can't stand immense detail and slow plot progression, I wouldn't recommend this book to you.