Top 10 great foxes in children’s books

Ali Sparkes, author of the Dax Jones Shapeshifters series, shares her favourite foxy fables

A fox has been stalking me for more than a decade.

He slid into my world through the tangled brambles on the far side of the stream at the bottom of our garden, his tail straight and his snout high. This may be a real memory. But around this time Dax Jones slid into my mind through the tangled brambles on the far side of my imagination.

Dax was an average kid who one day shapeshifted into a fox. Soon after, my imaginings shapeshifted into a five-part adventure series for Oxford Children’s Books. Dax Jones has roamed my mental thicket ever since.

I love foxes but not everyone’s with me on this. Foxes get a bad press. Here is my top 10 foxy fables - in which the fox gets represented in every light. If you read them all you can make your own mind up…

1. The Gingerbread Man – folk tale

Cast as a villain for early readers, our cunning fox offers Gingerbread Man a ride across the river on his tail, back, snout and – oops – in his snappy jaws. (Yum!) But if you ask me, that freshly-baked delinquent had it coming.

2. Fox In Sox by Dr Seuss

In gloriously weird illustration, the fox in Dr Seuss’s superb tongue twisting tale is once again represented as a clever sweet-talker. Poor Mr Knox hasn’t a hope of escaping the Fox In Socks’s increasingly bonkers word games… or has he?

3. The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

Fox reputation takes a battering again in this classic, when the little wooden puppet boy is conned by a fox and a cat, both faking disability. The pair are after Pinnochio’s five gold coins and try to murder him.

4. The Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl

This time we get the lupine point of view as Mr Fox outsmarts odious farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean when they try to trap and murder his family. True – in real life, some of the animals befriended by the Fox family would end up as dinner, rather than dinner guests – but this anthropomorphic romp is great fun.

5. Flambards by KM Peyton

Never read this if you love foxes. The hunting scenes are graphically unpleasant. And yet I confess, as a child, I loved the Flambards books, in which a teenage girl finds herself through horse riding… and hunting (ugh!). It partly inspired the blood-thirsty fox-hunting chapter in The Shapeshifter: Running The Risk.

6. Little Foxes by Michael Morpurgo

I met Michael Morpurgo a while back and told him he always makes me cry. This story is no exception as lonely foundling Billy Bunch finds love in the wilderness by adopting some orphan foxes. Very beautifully told and never sentimental. Yeah, I cried again.

 7. Aesop’s Fables

The fox gets many outings in these ancient stories – mocking the crane by offering him soup in a shallow bowl, flattering a cheesy windfall from a crow’s beak and convincing a daft goat to jump down a well so he can use it as a ladder. The fox is sneaky, false and callous. I suspect Aesop kept chickens.

 8. The Fox & The Star by Coralie Bickford-Smith

This is a picture book you’ll want to rip apart… and frame all around your house. Then you’ll have to buy another. The fox can’t find the star which guides it through the dark woods. Here, in exquisite illustrations and short, perfectly sculpted sentences, is a story of loss and resilience. You’ll cry into your children’s hair.

9. The Fox & The Hound by Daniel P Mannix

Full of grim realism, this is a kind of land-based Moby Dick story as a master of the hounds becomes obsessed with hunting a single fox – Tod – with a single foxhound – Copper. Disney’s movie was very loosely based on this but with less death and mutilation. Not one for bedtime reading.

10. The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes

This is the title poem in a collection by the former poet laureate, in which he describes nature at its wildest. The Thought Fox is a wonderful piece of writing… about writing. The fox’s tracks through the snow mimic the writer’s first hesitant words across white typewriter paper. Means more to me than I can say.

Dax’s sixth adventure – The Shapeshifter: Feather & Fang by Ali Sparkes is out now. Buy it at the Guardian bookshop. 

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