My Rating: ⭐️⭐️1/2

Title: The Bear

Author: Andrew Krivak

Format: eBook (NetGalley)

Pages: 224

Publication Date: February 11, 2020

Categories: Dystopian, Literary Fiction, Fable

Disclaimer: **I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.  All thoughts and opinions are my own.**

In an Eden-like future, a girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain. They own a few remnants of civilization: some books, a pane of glass, a set of flint and steel, a comb. The father teaches his daughter how to fish and hunt and the secrets of the seasons and the stars. He is preparing her for an adulthood in harmony with nature, for they are the last of humankind. But when the girl finds herself alone in an unknown landscape, it is a bear that will lead her back home through a vast wilderness that offers the greatest lessons of all, if she can learn to listen. A cautionary tale of human fragility, of love and loss, The Bear is a stunning tribute to the beauty of nature’s dominion. 

Thank you to Bellevue Literary Press and NetGalley for giving me a chance to read this eARC.

I chose this book to read because it was out of my comfort zone and as I started reading I was like, wow, YES, this is definitely out of my comfort zone. I read romance and ya books, mostly fantasy these days but I like my contemporary stuff too. This story is written like a fable and I put it down so many times I didn’t realize I’ve had it on my NetGalley for more than three months now! Well it was time to finish it.

The writing is poetic and told like a fable but it is sparse and this book only clocks in at 224 pages! It took me three months to finish what I could usually finish in three hours. It was so hard for me to get into the story, I was so bored. There is no plot. There is no punctuation when the characters speak. The characters have no names, on purpose though, but still, it bugged me.

The father and daughter live in a post-apocalyptic world, surviving by living off the land, hunting for their food, preparing it and so forth, same for the next day. The father teaches her lessons, year after year of her life he gifts her something that will help her survive this life. It is a tale of survival, enduring and loss. But because I couldn’t quite get into reading the book, a lot of the message went over my head.

It was definitely different and I did get the message of the book. It’s a story that makes you think, at least to question what the book was trying to say. It wasn’t for me but I think if you like books that read like a fable and don’t get hung up on things like punctuation, you would enjoy this.