Foxs Dream

This is a nice book. The prose are sparse but there is plenty in the illustrations to discuss with your kids. The lone wolf is wandering the frozen forest, crazed by hunger. In a nod to Alice in Wonderland, he chases after a snow hare, and ends up in a hallucinatory frozen world of sensory overload. We get several beautiful pages of the images he sees in the reflected moonlight, culminating in the likeness of his own mother nursing him and his siblings, "he remembers his family and the nearness of his mother." It's a beautiful illustration of the developmental process talked about in the object relations school, when a baby must internalize the love of the maternal figure, must be able to draw on it for self-soothing in times of tension. We see the fox's development progress even further, when he ultimately has to walk away from these beautiful hallucinations, and "little by little, the winter sky grows brighter," until we find our protagonist pursuing a vixen. There is a tender illustration of the two foxes nuzzling romantically, and the book ends with intimation at the spring ahead, the mating, and the child maturing and becoming the parent. Bravo, Keizaburo!

The illustrations and images shown as you flip through the pages are the kind that you remember as a kid, and it always stays somewhere in the back of your brain until you notice it lying on the ground, under a stack of books on the floor, and you pick it up and read through again. Then, you remember how you felt the power of the images go through you.It may be a simple children's book in terms of the language and vague story, but the ice forest, fox pictures, and most of all the picture of the 3 brothers leaping in the sun, all seem as if they are the very essence of all them made into picture form.Buy it for your kid, or for yourself.

Fox's Dream is visually stunning! Mr. Tejima made the animals very lifelike and they were all illustrated beautifully. One of the things that I loved about this book, besides the characters, was its realistic environment-how in the Fox's memory of his childhood in the spring, it was very much like you were in a green meadow with the glowing sun and its warmth. The environments made you feel that way. The text was also well used in conjunction with the illustrations. I'd recomend this book to anyone and, if you like foxes, winter, or just beautifully made books, this is a must read.