The animals who once called Farthing Wood their home, before making an arduous cross-country journey to reach the safety of White Deer Park, return in this third adventure, facing a new kind of challenge. This time the danger comes, not from humankind, but from the animal world. Fox and Vixen, now the happy parents of four young cubs - Bold, Friendly, Charmer and Dreamer - find that they have earned the ire of a local, long-established fox named Scarface. As they encroach upon his territory, Scarface retaliates in a variety of ways against Fox and his family, and in a particularly sad moment, Dreamer is killed. Fox longs for revenge, but is mindful of his duty to the other animals, who are also drawn into the feud between the vulpine families. When Fox fails to kill his enemy, during single combat, it has far-reaching consequences for many of his old friends from Farthing Wood, and they begin to doubt his leadership. Adder, in the meantime, has been enlisted in the effort to defeat the enemy. The book closes as many animals, including Charmer and Friendly, find mates. Bold, on the other hand, leaves the park to look for adventure...

Much like its predecessors, I enjoyed Fox's Feud immensely, finding it an engaging, engrossing animal adventure. As someone who is interested in the depiction of foxes in children's literature, I was particularly fascinated by the vulpine characters, and found some interesting parallels between the figure of Fox, and his medieval ancestor, Reynard. In particular, the friendship between Fox and Badger here, recalls the similar relationship between those animals in the Reynard story. I do think that the weaknesses of Dann's central vision - the idea of a group of animals that would normally have antagonistic, or predator/prey relationships in the wild being friends - begin to show through a bit here. Some of the predator animals are forced to hunt outside of the park, so as not to eat their friends by accident, but this leads naturally to the question - is a solution (the non-aggression pact) that is not sustainable on a wider level, and simply couldn't be applied universally, a real solution? Can it really be used as a moral focus for a story of this kind? It's clear in the story that Scarface is the villain, not simply because he kills - many animals need to do so, to live - but because he kills for non-survival reasons. This formulation ignores the fact that some animal species do naturally kill their rivals, or their rivals' offspring, perhaps not as a means of immediate survival, but as a way of ensuring long-term welfare. I enjoy Dann's storytelling, and the unique animal society he has created, but there are definitely times when the cracks in his thinking show. Perhaps the idea of a pan-zoological utopia simply works better when the antagonists are human, rather than animal. Leaving that aside, this is still an immensely enjoyable book, one I would recommend to all fans of the previous two adventures. ( )