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.