YMMV / Tales of the Fox

• Ass Pull: In a sense, all four books' resolutions come out of nowhere right towards the end; it's especially egregious in Prince of the North when Mavrix and Biton just effortlessly remove all the monsters in the north to win an argument with each other. Stylistically, this is meant to evoke typical Greek mythologies and stories.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Is Van telling an anecdote of his traveling days? Settle down and prepare for 15-20 pages that have nothing to do with the plot.
• Cliché Storm: Balamung fits pretty much every "evil wizard" stereotype in the book.
• Growing the Beard: The second omnibus is noticeably better than the first in terms of writing quality.
• Replacement Scrappy: Not every fan likes the relatively mild and (at first) rather testy Selatre over entertainingly wise-cracking and sarcastic Elise from the first book. It doesn't help that Gerin goes from Happily Married in the first book to years after Elise left in the second, with zero foreshadowing to the audience about it.
  • After taking pains to show how Duren inherited some of Elise's flaws in King of the North, he's abruptly replaced by Dagref in Fox and Empire who is essentially a clone of his father.
• Squick: Why Turtledove felt a need to describe Biton's massive phallus is something best left uncontemplated.
• Tear Jerker: Gerin meets Elise twenty years later. She didn't have a happy life, and is a little bitter about it. She later disappears after the Empire invades the village she'd settled down in, and there are a number of unpleasant but sadly common fates Gerin contemplates could've happened.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: After being a central character in King of the North, Duren gets one whole scene before the epilogue of Fox and Empire.
  • Snarky, independent Elise vanishes after the first book and only reappears for one scene in the fourth, twenty years later.