The Bear / Claire Cameron

   Once again: oh boy, a month between posts. My excuse is school, also again. All my better-scheduling intentions came to nothing and I've ended up swamped. Next semester, I will be better.

   Anyways, I've been consuming more movies than books lately (a post about them will come soon) but here it is folks: a post about BEAR ATTACKS. Well, a post about a book about children who escape from a bear attack.

   Remember when I read In The After and was all "ugh, precocious children." WELL LET ME TELL YOU The Bear / Claire Cameron does indeed have children but they are not uncommonly skilled/knowledgeable/savvy, and I love it. Warning: if you can't handle books about children in danger then do not read this one. (Once when my sister was pregnant she asked me for some books to read and I said "any stipulations?" and she said "I don't want to read any where mothers, fathers, or children are in danger or die." at which point I said "hehhhh...okay" and delved into my bookshelves which feature a preponderance of murder, danger, and death. I ended up lending her The Art of War and Alive, which is about a soccer team that crashes in the Andes and then resorts to cannibalism (it's a true story). Good work, Glynis.)

   SO! Anna is out camping with her family, when things go terribly awry. She and her brother have to evade a bear after it kills their parents, and the book follows them from the little island where they're camped to the moment when Anna returns to the site as an adult. The book is written from the perspective of five-year-old Anna, and it is riveting; the adult reader understands the situation better than the narrator does, which makes for some compelling reading. Anna's narration is first-person present-tense, which usually drives me batty right along with precocious children. However, taking into account the age of our narrator, the choice to shy away from past tense makes perfect sense. It works.

   As an added bonus, I definitely tweeted at Claire Cameron after finishing it, and not only did she reply but she also followed me. I then proceeded to tweet about what I was thinking about, which was shape-shifting aliens, so she might not be following me any more. (Is someone in your life acting out of character?? They are probably a Skrull, or other type of shape-shifting alien.) Also: the book is set in Canada and written by a Canadian.

   If you aren't adverse to reading about bear-maulings, I encourage you to get your mitts on this wee novel. It's short, it's enjoyable, it'll strike a chord.