Eve Tharlet is a talented illustrator.  Her watercolor world is beautiful, delicate, and a little messy, all at once.  Her fox and badger figures are sweet, expressive, and lively.  Some children will want to stare at her pictures for hours.  However, the words do not stand up to the illustrations here.  Perhaps it is a problem of translation, either in method or culture.  The dialogue here feels wooden and awkward.  The young characters do not converse like children, the adults feel strained.  Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that this is a series.  Without prior knowledge of the characters and how they met, one does not know the context for the relationships one sees.  This leads to confusion.   This volume in the series may compliment a library which already owns the previous two volumes, but it does not effectively stand alone.