Comment

Sep 04, 2014stephaniedchase rated this title 1.5 out of 5 stars
It's always difficult to pull off a child narrator, and THE BEAR is far less successful than the novel many readers will compare it to, ROOM. For me, too much of this novel was implausible: that there is a cooler big enough to fit a five-year-old and a two-year old; that the bear would have left the children in the partially open cooler alone; that Anna, whose parents take her backcountry camping, doesn't know what a bear is; that we are supposed to believe Anna is naive enough to not understand what happened to her father but savvy enough to keep a two-year-old alive with no food or water and a major case of poison ivy for several days. What could have excelled as a short story instead falls incredibly flat as a novel.