13. In the Grip of Winter by Colin Dann

Love these covers!

I finally have read another Colin Dann!  My good buddy brought me home two of his books in these great Beaver Books versions and I convinced my daughter for us to read it together.  It takes place immediately after The Animals of Farthing Wood.  The gang of wandering animals have found a new home in a reserve for white deer that they call White Deer Park.  Everything is looking good until winter comes, a particularly hard one this year.

My daughter pointed out, somewhat disappointingly I thought, that this book was more episodic in nature.  It is overall about the animals and their struggle with winter, but it is really made up of separate mini-adventures, including Badger getting injured and then taken in and healed by the warden, his turning on his friends, the attempts to get food to survive through the winter, the warden's sickness and poachers coming on the reserve and finally Toad instinctively trying to return to Farthing Wood (which is now a housing development).  The cover makes it seem like it is all about Badger, which I think also contributed to my daughter's expectation of a single narrative.

We enjoyed it, but it didn't grab me the way my first reading of King of the Vagabonds did.  It's still a lot of fun. It's an interesting juxtaposition and a bit of a delicate one where the hero animals are sentient and can talk as well as resist their instincts to eat each other, while the "NPC" characters are still animals (though they can also talk).  I'm curious to see how it evolves as I also have the next book, which we are reading now.  It turns out there is a bit of a Farthing Wood series.