This is a searingly beautiful account of Catherine Raven’s journey from alienation to healing through the ministrations of an unusual wild fox. Raven is a survivor, a hardy soul from a dysfunctional family, highly intelligent, acutely sensitive, and brutally honest. Trained as a biologist, she rambles through an eclectic sampling of natural history and her own observations while attaching them to carefully chosen if idiosyncratic selections from literature: Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, Lafcadio Hearn, and, especially, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose Little Prince she reads aloud to the fox (!). Why, she asks, is mankind so detached from the natural world? Why do we push it away, relegating it to “scientific scrutiny” (and too often wanton destruction) instead of viewing and nurturing it with the totality of our humanity? A question ever more relevant as we stand on the brink of losing so much of this world… Raven’s helplessness in the face of a wildfire from which she cannot save Fox seems emblematic of our present struggles. Her ability to move past his death and pull together the fragmented strands of her life should give us hope and, perhaps, suggest a way forward.