With Bear, National Book Award finalist Julia Phillips (Disappearing Earth) crafts her own version of a Grimm fairy tale, which she quotes in the epigraph. Despite its singsong familiarity, the close of this passage--"and when he growled they laughed"--establishes an unnerving tone: comforting yet threaded with an undercurrent of menace. In lieu of the Snow-white and Rose-red of the original story, Bear introduces readers to Sam and her older sister, Elena. Where Sam rages against their lot--financial precarity, missed opportunities, and the looming certainty of their young mother's death--Elena faces it all with a calming strength, one that Sam relies on entirely.
Born 13 months apart, the sisters have shared everything, including the terror of their mother's last boyfriend and a dream one day to sell their ramshackle house and escape the oppressive nature of their life on Washington's San Juan Island. That shared dreaming gives Sam something to hope for, a way out. Now, as their mother's illness lingers and they grapple with the aftereffects of the pandemic lockdowns, "they had less time to whisper about what would be. They needed to dedicate their days to what was. But Sam still dreamed." For Sam, almost everything is temporary, including her job at the food counter on the ferry and her relationship with coworker Ben. Elena is her only constant, their sisterhood "the one bond that would last their whole lives." But everything changes the day a bear shows up at their door.
To say more about what happens would spoil the taut brilliance of Phillips's narrative. Bear is the kind of story that keeps readers up late into the night, gulping down the last pages with urgency and a fierce sense of protection for these sisters and their hope "that they would make it through terrifying things, that they would be able to leave with no scars other than the ones they already had." But trauma endures, and life, Sam knows, "was made up of tiny unremarkable griefs." She rails against the injustice of "the whole world, which was twisted and threatening and completely unfair, which demanded that Sam defend herself but never gave her any of what she needed to try." The book's single word title reminds readers of the creature that threatens, of course, but also of all the things women are forced to bear, even those that feel most unbearable. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian
Shelf Talker: Bear is a fast-moving river--smooth on the surface but churning underneath--and sisters Sam and Elena are caught in its inexorable current as they wrestle with conflicting hopes for the future.