The Tattoo Fox

I was attracted to this sweet little book after walking into an independent Edinburgh book shop earlier this year. I couldn’t resist buying it as I knew my boys would love to read a story that took place in the city centre where they live and grew up. 

The book tells the story of a fox who travels to Edinburgh city from the Borders looking for a place to stay and ends up at living in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle. The adventures that the fox has in the book are very entertaining and we just couldn’t put the book down.  This story is full of adventure and lessons about friendship and loyalty.

I would recommend this book to children from maybe seven years old and definitely to parents who enjoy reading with their kids. I recommend this book because of how simple language using short sentences and paragraphs along with amazing illustrations every couple of pages are used to tell a really nice and wholesome story. The book is presented in a simple and easy way for reasonably literate children to easily read and understand the story and messages. The inclusion of a location that they are familiar with helped to capture my children’s imaginations and they really enjoyed the book. If you were totally unfamiliar with Edinburgh then it might lose something but would still be a heart-warming story although having a rough idea of what tattoo meant in this context would aid understanding. This would be a great book to bridge the gap between a true picture book with a sentence or two on each page and a full blown novel although might still be daunting for a child just starting out.

This book was published by Luath press limited in Edinburgh which is an independent publisher and the author is Alasdair Hutton who did an amazing job transporting this story from an encounter that did happened between a little fox and the chief executive and producer of the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

I just want to say that the cover of this book is just so pretty that as soon as my sons saw it they wanted me to read it. To them.

Definitely a book is worth reading and I have already bought the sequel which I would be talking about next.