Book Reflection: Maudie and Bear

Maudie and Bear, by Jan Ormerod and Freya Blackwood.

Now, this book I loved. I read this book twice in one evening because I finished it, and then wanted to dive straight back into it again. I think I read it at least six times on the first weekend after I borrowed it, and I've gone back to it a few times since. I love it now, as a grown up fan of picture books, and I would have loved it as a child, when I used to deep dive into books like this and spend hours pouring over the pictures.

I think I loved this book from the moment I saw the bear riding the bicycle on the front cover – but not just because bears and bicycles are two of my favourite things. There was something highly evocative about the picture, and the book kept that magic going throughout the whole experience. There’s something entirely timeless about this book. It was published in 2010, but if I had found it back when I was a child in the 1980s, nothing would have seemed out of place to me at all. Maybe that’s why it appeals to me so much – because it feels like a book I did read and love when I was a child, even though it isn’t one.

The book is a collection of short stories (not something I often get to say when talking about picture books aimed at five-year-olds), which each feature lovely little vignettes about a girl called Maudie and the bear who appears to be her primary caregiver. It's unclear what the exact relationship is for the bear and Maudie, but if you replaced "bear" with "grandpa", the entire book would still make perfect sense. Not that a girl being cared for by a bear doesn't make perfect sense.

The book seems to me to be a bit like an alternate reality version of Little Dee – a comic strip by Chris Baldwin in which a lost girl is adopted by a kindly bear named Ted. It also has some similarities with the television programme Bear in the Big Blue House, which also features a kindly bear as the gentle head of the household (he spent his time patiently wrangling characters who were a lot like young children as well).

In Little Dee, the bear and his makeshift family (which includes a runaway dog and a vulture, for some unfathomable reason) live in a cave in the woods. In Maudie and Bear, the girl and her ursine guardian live in a lovely Federation style house in what is clearly an Australian country town. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say somewhere in Victoria, although I’ve seen houses and buildings like that in Queensland, New South Wales and Tasmania.

The book never actually tells you or shows you where it is set, but I know that style of architecture so well that I can’t imagine the book could be set anywhere but “here”, if you know what I mean. Plus, there’s a scene in which a lorikeet is sitting on Bear’s head and a couple of currawongs are on the ground in front of him.

But, even without the birds, the illustrations are still so evocative of “place” that the book is endowed with a kind of magic realism that makes it seem perfectly natural that this is an Australian country town in which talking bears wear hats, rake leaves, wash floors, ride bicycles and raise human girls. Every now and then I find a book where I feel like I could take a vacation in the artwork – just jump into the pictures Mary-Poppins-style and have a lovely time there for a while. This is one of those books.

And the stories are all lovely, too. While Maudie could do with pulling her head in occasionally, the relationship between the girl and the bear is just charming. I particularly like the way Bear “thinks about” Maudie’s temper tantrum by leaving her to it while he has a cup of tea and a piece of cake. I would actually recommend this book for fathers, grandfathers or uncles of young girls. It’s exactly the kind of book that a kindly male role model should share with his three-to-five year old little girl.

This is one of those library finds that I wanted to buy for myself, but it's a little out of print at the moment (apparently the publishers aren't sure if it's worth reprinting - I would like to say to them that it most definitely is). Copies are currently selling for $80 in the few bookshops that have them at present, and while I can honestly say this is currently one of my favourite books, I don't love it that much.

I did track down a copy in German for less than $40, though, so that will be fun when it arrives. But the title of the German book is Marrietta und ihr Bär, which seems wrong to me. Bear isn't Maudie's bear - he's just Bear. And Maudie is as much his Maudie as he's her bear.

And I Fancy Myself a Poet

The call to write
Hits me now and then
And I fancy myself a poet.
A dozen notebooks
Or more
Filled over the years
(Well, partially filled)
With jottings that never see the light of day -
And probably never will -
Because I fancy myself a poet,
But I never assume
Anyone else will.
Is poetry a career or a vocation
In this day and age?
Or just an affectation?
Does anyone really read poetry now,
Apart from posers like me
Who fancy themselves poets?
And is a poet one who writes
Or one who is read - who publishes?
And yet, for many years now,
I've fancied myself a poet.

- "Karuke"

Book Reflection: The Great Bear

The Great Bear, by Libby Gleeson & Armin Greder.

On first reading, I did not like this book. I thought the illustrations were ugly and kind of disturbing, and I thought the plot was perfunctory and kind of depressing.

However, I was willing to concede that I hadn’t exactly given it the best of reading environments. I had been gathering books in my library for a display that had the theme “Religion and Philosophy”, and I was specifically looking for children’s books and picture books which could fit the theme (however loosely).... and I may have picked up a couple of books featuring bears while I was at it.

I’ll admit that the bear books were picked up more for me than for the display. One of them (which I will review later) had nothing to do with religion or philosophy at all, but The Great Bear looked like it might have a tangential connection to the theme, so I quickly read it to see if I had collected it for the display after all. A quick reading while standing next to a pile of books that I’d dumped on someone else’s desk wasn’t the best treatment, so I wasn’t sure if the book itself was perfunctory or just my treatment of it.

So I took it home and read it “properly”. As I read it, I realised that the illustrations were from the perspective of the bear (a dancing bear in a travelling circus who was used to people poking her with sticks and throwing rocks at her), so it made sense that they would be ugly and kind of disturbing. I started to think it was really quite clever.

But then, the plot was both too deep for most children, and not deep enough for grown ups. And half-way through the book the illustrations stopped being from the perspective of the bear, and the story stopped using words entirely – it’s like Gleeson and Greder set up one method of story telling but switched to another half-way through. And in the end I felt a bit let down by the whole thing (even though I’d come around to thinking the illustrations, while still ugly and disturbing, were also interesting and nuanced).

So, on second reading, I did not like this book. I wouldn’t buy it for any children I know, and I wouldn’t buy it for myself. But I might recommend it to an artist friend of mine who likes things I don’t like. She’d probably really enjoy it.