Great Middle Grade Reads discussion
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Pax
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BOTM for January is Pax
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SaraKat
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rated it 3 stars
Jan 03, 2021 09:03AM
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On my to read list for ages!
Great! Looking forward to it. Will order it from the library.
Yay! Mine should be in this week! I ordered it the other day for my library. :)
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I have wanted to read Pax for several years, and a copy is sitting on my shelves. I look forward to finally being given the push to read it!
Rebecca wrote: "I read this a couple of years ago. I'll be interested to see what others think, and will share my review later in the month."Me too! :)
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I'm really struggling to want to read on, for all sorts of reasons, and I'm only about one-third in.
I expected to like it a lot more than I actually did. I appreciated the messages about mindfulness and presence, yet was disappointed with the book, overall.
The library copy I requested finally came in, and I finished it today.The author gives the impression of having researched foxes very well, the way we get inside the head of Pax. It reminded me of A Wolf Called Wander, which I thought was done a little better, but Pax has the addition of human friendship and his thoughts about humans. I liked the parts about Pax best.
The undefined place and time were rather distracting to me, though, and the war seemed unrealistic because I couldn't imagine the scope of it--it seemed very localized. If the reader understood that the war was the Civil War, for example, or World War II, all that would be needed would be that bit of info and even a child reader could fill in at least a sketchy idea of what was going on.
There were some beautiful parts when Peter is with Vola, but I was sometimes pulled out of the story by the random or far-fetched nature of some of the events.
I found that the way Pax Peter at the end was sad but I think it was a good twist.
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ETA: on the other hand, the book made enough of an impression that I remember it almost 3 years later.
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The main problems for me were:
1) normalising abandoning pets in the wild - that really waved a red flag, and makes me angry just to type it
2) the lack of setting - what war, between whom, where, when?
The second gave the whole story a lack of coherence for me. There are woods, there are spaces that suggest it's the northern/northeastern US, there are fighters coming in from the west (who, what??) and the resistance is using primitive mines to defend themselves. Is it a dystopia? But the kids are at school practising baseball as usual....
And the story is, pardon me, one we've had before. I know kids like the predictable, but...
Why did this book gain awards? I'd have understood if it had been written in the 1950s.
My three stars is generous. I did like Vola.
Jemima wrote: "I got over the worst of it, but really, I couldn't engage with the rest. I liked Vola, on the whole. The main problems for me were:
1) normalising abandoning pets in the wild - that really waved..."
How did it normalize abandoning pets in the wild? It seemed like the whole thing was about the guilt that abandoning Pax induced in Peter and how he realized he should never have done it.
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It's not about Peter, it's about Pax.
No attempt to rehome Pax in any way.
Father says Pax is wild and will cope.
Pax copes.
Father justified in abandoning pet in forest.
So the message that people believe is the one they want to believe - it's okay to abandon animals in the wild, they'll cope.
They don't.
If Peter had found Pax half-starved, riddled with lice, dragging his foot from being attacked by a predator, and needing his eye removed because it's ulcerated from a bramble scratch, it would be more realistic. Those are typical problems for pets found abandoned in the wild.
Please support your animal shelters, they are being swamped in lockdown.
I see what you mean-- that the ending logically justifies the father, but it doesn't feel like that's the message. Don't you think the reader will side with Peter, who went to great lengths to right the wrong he had collaborated with? The reader sees from the story that Peter's fears were justified--that Pax *would* have starved or been killed if not for kind foxes he met on the way, just as Peter would have died if not for Vola. (It's a little muddled by the fact that Pax is not a domesticated pet, but a wild animal raised as a pet. It's kind of like the author is trying to say both, "don't abandon pets" and "let wild animals be wild" at the same time.)
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I went back to my review to see what I had thought of the book:What I like about this book is the personal growth, not just the main characters, but in all the characters. Peter's mentor is a war veteran. I like the way her relationship with Peter developed.
If there was one thing I would change, it would be the vague location. As for the ending, I would have preferred a few more lines to tie up all the ends. For example I liked it when Pax met his mentor, but more could be said about his mentor's partner in the later part of the story. I'd also like to see some closure with Peter's father and grandfather.
