Dreaming the Bear

February 27, 2017
Originally published in the U.K., Thebo’s U.S. debut awkwardly juxtaposes a teen’s adjustment to a new environment with a supernatural, out-of-body connection to a bear. A move from England to Yellowstone National Park not only disrupts narrator Darcy’s social life but also lands her with a case of pneumonia, as well as persistent “seeing-myself-from-a-distance” moments. While snowshoeing, the perilously exhausted Darcy lies down with a wounded bear who has lost her cubs, beginning a series of episodes with the bear in which Darcy enters a faraway state and observes herself from the outside. Darcy and the bear’s connection strengthens with their every interaction, and their ill health becomes increasingly intertwined, but the jumbled narrative structure can be tricky to parse as it rotates among Darcy’s first-person narration, italicized out-of-body observations, and third-person sections that anthropomorphize the bear’s perceptions (“She ran. She left her cubs and ran. Can a bear feel shame?”). It’s an unusual twist on an against-the-odds wilderness adventure but doesn’t quite come together cohesively. Ages 12–up. Agent: Sophie Sorell-Barnes, MBA Literary.

February 15, 2017
A white teenage girl finds acclimating to the Montana wilderness difficult after her life in England until she has a life-changing experience with a grizzly bear.Darcy is recovering from pneumonia, contracted after she arrived in Montana from England with her family, and feels poorly. Her parents and her older brother (all also white) are solicitous about her health, but Darcy is steadfastly weak and just as steadfastly self-pitying and self-absorbed in her first-person, present-tense narration. Ostensibly because she is so ill, but remarkably conveniently, Darcy often has out-of-body experiences, and such is the case when she, collapsing from too much snowshoeing, crawls into a cave and cuddles with a wounded, hibernating grizzly bear. The connection between the bear and Darcy (readers are privy to the bear's wincingly anthropomorphized thoughts in separate paragraphs) is developed as Darcy decides she needs to feed the bear and begins to do so in secret. Implausibilities throughout test readers' trust. (Can an invalid girl really hoist a dead elk onto a sled? Wouldn't a cabin so remote kids snowmobile to school have a generator?) While the wrongness of habituating wild bears to people is emphasized, the full inevitable tragedy is trivialized into humancentric empowerment. A romanticized and often implausible story of human and wild that doesn't do justice to either. (Fiction. 12-14)

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March 1, 2017

Gr 4-6-Darcy's family recently moved from England to the winter wilds of Yellowstone National Park for her dad's wildlife research. Not only is she away from her friends, Wi-Fi, phone service, and basically all of civilization, she's also recovering from pneumonia, often feeling light-headed and seeing black spots. Despite this, doctor's orders are to go on a brisk outdoor hike each day to "strengthen the lungs." As the book opens, Darcy has pushed herself too hard on one of these hike. In a haze, she wanders into a cave to rest and ends up cuddling up next to an injured, hibernating grizzly bear. Though Darcy knows that any contact with a bear is extremely dangerous (confirmed by a mandatory bear safety course), it's also exhilarating. Her subsequent visits to the bear cave become more complicated and involved: as the bear wakes up in early spring, she starts bringing it food when she realizes it's too hurt to leave its cave area. Before too long, Darcy can keep "her" bear a secret no more. Thebo has written an engaging and succinct tale that is both dreamlike and realistic. Darcy's out-of-body experiences are intriguing and make her situation with the bear seem plausible. At the same time, the descriptions of the natural environment of Yellowstone National Park are excellent, complete with debilitating blizzards, rock climbing, and the realities of humans living among wildlife. Darcy and her family are well-developed characters, with real struggles and stresses in their relationships, but their genuine love for one another is evident. VERDICT A short and appealing work that is part animal story, part adventure, part mystery, and entirely heartfelt. A great choice for middle grade readers.-Jenny Berggren, Longfellow Middle School, Berkeley, CA

Copyright 2017 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2017
When her naturalist father announces that their family is moving from England to Yellowstone National Park for two years, Darcy is filled with typical teenage outrage. No WiFi, no friends, just a lot of wildernessand a case of pneumonia. But as she recovers from her illness, snowshoeing laboriously near the family's cabin to build up her strength, she finds something that does interest hera badly wounded grizzly, starved and bereft of her cubs. Darcy feels a strong connection with the bear and tries to help her, not realizing that her intervention reduces the bear's chances of survival. Thebo treads delicately between realism and fantasy, respecting practicalities about grizzlies while at the same time imagining a hallucinatory edge to Darcy's illness and giving her close interaction with the bear a fantastical, psychic dimension. Spirit and flesh thus interweave strangely and hauntingly: the bear's own smelly, gangrenous fever becomes associated with Darcy's illnesswhich turns out to be not pneumonia but altitude intolerance. While Thebo's depiction of teenage-girl concerns tends toward the generic, her imaginative play with realistic wilderness experience and Darcy's peculiar, lightheaded condition make this an unusual and surprising read. deirdre f. baker

(Copyright 2017 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)