While I appreciate non-English books being translated for American audiences, there is quickly the issue of how do we translate a novel. Do we go word-for-word or line-by-line crafting the closest possible English version of the Chinese best seller or do we get loosey goosey and try to capture the same rhythm, tone, sentence structure, meaning, feel, etc. White Fox falls too far into the former. Before I even talk about the actual content of the story, I have to point out that this is already an inferior version of Chen Jiatong's book and without learning Chinese, this is all I have to go on. Perhaps Chen wrote a beautiful, elegant series of lines that would have wowed me, but this version didn't. Most of the lines are clunky, stilted, and unnatural and for a story that is trying to be fantastical, the descriptions and adjectives don't have any heart. I never get any long paragraphs painting a wondrous picture of a setting or a character. Again, this is specifically about the version of the story that Jennifer Feeley gives us and I can't speak to Chen's writing. The story, however, I can blame on Chen. It feels like a studio children's movie where a board of directors were constantly saying, "It's a stupid kids' movie, it doesn't need to be good; it's for kids." White Fox feels like a story a mother would tell to a small child, just on paper. Yeah, that sounds good, but those aren't often well planned and crafted stories taking place within a slowly building mythology. This is an incredibly cliche and bare bones story that slowly plots along during what should be down time and then racing through actual plot events. I won't veer into spoiler territory, but White Fox is very much about a journey from Point A to Point B with small scenes in-between to serve as bumps in the road. Much of what happens in-between are little blips that are essentially poorly told, ham-fisted fables that aren't really relevant to the larger story. White Fox is boring, slow, and uneventful and by the time I got to the cliff-hanger ending, I just wanted the story to be over. I guess the strength of the book is its themes, but Chen is so blunt and obvious with them that it's more grating than enlightening. True, this book is marketed for third through seventh grade, so I wasn't expecting anything weighty or complex and we do get some ideas that are interesting for what is essentially a middle school novel, but just because it is for kids, doesn't mean it has to be childish. Everything here is too simplistic: the themes are watered down, the characters are underdeveloped, the plot is hollow and uneventful, the setting is dull, and the scenes that should have gravitas feel unearned because we rushed and skipped through the set-up and establishing bits. Even if we narrow the marketing scope down to the bottom of the range and say this book is specifically for third graders and we then compare White Fox to other novels marketed toward that age (Magic Tree House, Charlotte's Web, James and the Giant Peach, etc) we can see that so much more can be done. Our lead, Dilah, is has no personality other than being a Mary Sue and his companions have even less. Much less important than the story and how it is told is the unnecessary artwork inside the book. The cover is fine, but the art inside is terrible. The distribution of the art is seemingly random as it isn't there at major events nor is it every couple of pages or chapters; it's just a handful throughout the whole book. The few we do get would be impressive if done by the audience of the book, but are, unfortunately, not. They are sloppy, lazy, and remind me of when we did thumbprint art in preschool, where you dip your finger in paint, make a paint fingerprint on the paper, and then turn that spot into a mouse or a turkey or whatever. The art here doesn't enhance the story and it doesn't help us visualize the setting or characters; it's only effect is to take up space. As a whole, White Fox is very disappointing and even if you lower your standards and view it specifically as a book for children, kids can handle (and deserve) a much better novel than this.