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ksbielenberg's review
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide and Death
tamdot's review against another edition
5.0
The Fleming family retreats to a family cottage in the Outer Hebrides following the death of Nick Fleming in 1980s West Germany. Accusations of treason and a suicide note from the diplomat lead his wife to question how well she knew her husband while her two daughters struggle to define themselves and her young son leaves clues for his “lost” father to find the family. As the Flemings arrive on the island, a tamed bear escapes from his owner and hides out in a sea cave. A strange connection forms between bear and boy as Bella Pollen weaves a sleepy sort of magic in The Summer of the Bear.
The novel moves at a well measured pace: slow but designed to capture readers. Pollen creates a world to spend time in. When she brings the main plot threads together, it’s with a feeling of moving the characters along to whatever waits for them after the last page is turned.
Pollen’s chapters alternate perspectives among the Fleming family. Letty pieces together evidence of Nick’s treason while shutting herself away from her children. Georgia, the older daughter, accompanied her father on a trip to East Berlin and knows something about the secrets he was keeping. Alba, the middle child, uses anger to keep her feelings at bay. Jamie is the special one; his mind doesn’t work the way it should and it takes him a long while to understand his father isn’t lost, but dead.
The characters could be written easily as stereotypes. The two daughters struggle to emerge as fully realized characters, with only Georgia achieving that successfully. Letty and Jamie, however, are very real. Jamie’s mental disabilities – which are never categorized clearly – could have made him too precious, but Pollen grounds his differences in having Jamie just be a child, fighting with his sister and looking for proof that his bear is real.
Jamie and his father were supposed to go to the circus on the day Nick died. Among the attractions was a bear act, and when Jamie sees a truck advertising a performing bear on the family’s trip to the island, he decides the bear will help him find his father.
The bear feels a connection to Jamie as well, and Pollen checks in with the bear in short chapters that may be too anthropomorphic for some readers but can be explained by the bear’s time with humans. Pollen stops short of delivering magic realism, but doesn’t offer explanations for everything either.
The Summer of the Bear has some flaws. The answers to Nick’s treasonous behaviors seem like an afterthought as the novel increases tension about Jamie and the bear. What Nick may or may not have done gives the other characters something else to do. An environmental MacGuffin near the end of the novel provides an excuse for Letty to leave the family cottage and not much else.
But the flaws are minor or, at least, don’t negate the engaging story Pollen tells. The Summer of the Bear is a novel to relish and to mourn when the last page is read.
The novel moves at a well measured pace: slow but designed to capture readers. Pollen creates a world to spend time in. When she brings the main plot threads together, it’s with a feeling of moving the characters along to whatever waits for them after the last page is turned.
Pollen’s chapters alternate perspectives among the Fleming family. Letty pieces together evidence of Nick’s treason while shutting herself away from her children. Georgia, the older daughter, accompanied her father on a trip to East Berlin and knows something about the secrets he was keeping. Alba, the middle child, uses anger to keep her feelings at bay. Jamie is the special one; his mind doesn’t work the way it should and it takes him a long while to understand his father isn’t lost, but dead.
The characters could be written easily as stereotypes. The two daughters struggle to emerge as fully realized characters, with only Georgia achieving that successfully. Letty and Jamie, however, are very real. Jamie’s mental disabilities – which are never categorized clearly – could have made him too precious, but Pollen grounds his differences in having Jamie just be a child, fighting with his sister and looking for proof that his bear is real.
Jamie and his father were supposed to go to the circus on the day Nick died. Among the attractions was a bear act, and when Jamie sees a truck advertising a performing bear on the family’s trip to the island, he decides the bear will help him find his father.
The bear feels a connection to Jamie as well, and Pollen checks in with the bear in short chapters that may be too anthropomorphic for some readers but can be explained by the bear’s time with humans. Pollen stops short of delivering magic realism, but doesn’t offer explanations for everything either.
The Summer of the Bear has some flaws. The answers to Nick’s treasonous behaviors seem like an afterthought as the novel increases tension about Jamie and the bear. What Nick may or may not have done gives the other characters something else to do. An environmental MacGuffin near the end of the novel provides an excuse for Letty to leave the family cottage and not much else.
But the flaws are minor or, at least, don’t negate the engaging story Pollen tells. The Summer of the Bear is a novel to relish and to mourn when the last page is read.
adeslibrary's review against another edition
3.0
struggled a bit with this one for the first two hundred pages but the writing is beautiful. so many lines got me
saraupsidedown's review against another edition
4.0
Lovely near magical island off the coast of Scotland, a broken family and, somehow, a bear
tcm_62's review against another edition
4.0
I really enjoyed this novel, in fact much more than I anticipated. An interesting combination of espionage, myth, mystery, spirituality and a family trying to rebuild their lives after the inexplicable death of their husband and father.
A diverse group of well-developed characters from the 'Ambassadress' at the embassy in Bonn to the colourful inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides, my favourite with the young son, Jamie, whose quirky and original way of making sense of his world, pulled me into the narrative.
Well-written, with beautiful and evocative images of these isolated isles, this is a highly recommended read.
A diverse group of well-developed characters from the 'Ambassadress' at the embassy in Bonn to the colourful inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides, my favourite with the young son, Jamie, whose quirky and original way of making sense of his world, pulled me into the narrative.
Well-written, with beautiful and evocative images of these isolated isles, this is a highly recommended read.
jonosdaman's review against another edition
3.0
I'm quite torn over this book, there were some very tender and heart-warming places, but I feel it was let down by a plot that didn't really go anywhere till the last few chapters and a very disappointing ending.
carrieliza's review against another edition
4.0
A good read for my day in the airport. A bit simplistic while at the same time being sort of unrealistic, but still fun.
nicospitsjive's review against another edition
3.0
Idk I had a really hard time getting into this book, I didn't like it. I tried to read it last summer thinking maybe it was me/my ambling attention. Upon giving it another try this spring I realized it was just a long, plodding introduction about 150 pages too long, made troublesome by how bratty the children were, and unrelatable the mother was.
souverian's review against another edition
2.0
Story:
A diplomat in the Cold War is dead: suspected suicide, suspected traitor. His family—a wife, two daughters, and a son—attempt to adjust to a new life out in the Hebrides. The wife, Letty, struggles to reconcile herself to the fact that her husband’s country thinks he’s a traitor. Each child—Georgiana, 17; Alba, 14; and Jamie, 8—have their own difficulties understanding why their father is dead. And somehow, among it all, a wrestling bear has escaped from its handler and is roaming the Scottish countryside, looking for something.
Style and Technique:
The Summer of the Bear is written in the third person, alternating between the current story and flashbacks. Writing for two timelines can often add an extra level of intrigue to a story as the past and the present attempt to reconcile themselves, but Pollen handles this technique very clumsily, and it comes off as disorganized. The story will spend a chapter or two in the Hebrides before switching to Bonn for a chapter spent in flashback, which is a solid method of comparing two timelines. However, there are several points during the chapter set in the present where the narrative will, with little or no warning, switch to flashback, jolting the reader out of the story’s flow and necessitating a recalibration.
The story itself is often quite unnecessary: a hundred pages could have easily been cut from the final draft without much of an impact having been made. It seems that the reader is often reading a rehashing of something that the story has already been over once or twice, and the narrative is weighted down to a near-death crawl towards the middle of the novel. The pace picks up again two-thirds of the way through the book, only to slow down again at the beginning of the climax all the way through the denouement. It does answer the questions posed by the narrative (was it suicide or murder? What happened in East Germany? Why the bear?), but does so slowly and sometimes in an unsatisfying manner. Although plenty of time passes during the book, the characters all seem to be stuck focused on one thing, and never able to move beyond it or think of anything else.
Pollen’s strength lies in her descriptive abilities. You can see the windswept moors of Ballanish, the area of the Hebrides in which the present part of the story is set, smell the cold tang of the sea, and hear the symphony of crashing waves and calling seabirds. Bonn, a city in Germany where much of the flashback timeline takes place, is sharply contrasted. It seems to be illustrated in shades of grey, which give off the strong sense of physical and societal restrictions that were placed on Letty while she and her children lived there as the family of a diplomat, no easy position to be in.
Characterization:
Pollen has several characters to keep track of, and she establishes each of them with their own specific trait, but just one. Letty is the grieving mother, cold and distanced from her children. Georgiana is the sexually frustrated seventeen-year-old, sole witness to the clandestine mission her father undertook on the other side of the Iron Curtain that’s caused so much suspicion to be posthumously piled on him. Alba is the poisonous adolescent with murder in every thought, and irrational in every action. Jamie is the innocent boy with a painful naïveté towards every situation he finds himself in, to the point where the reader must question whether they were that oblivious at age eight.
These characters have evolved, to some extent, by the end of the novel, but it’s done in a jerky or unbelievable manner (for example, Georgiana’s character development happens entirely at the hands of a character who is never mentioned again after they’ve fulfilled their purpose as her catalyst). Letty, although (understandably) the one most fixated on her husband’s death, is the most dynamic and three-dimensional character, although within the context of this book, these terms must be used loosely. Furthermore, although the characterization could be described as sparse, the author does provide the reader with very sudden, very intimate details in a manner that comes across as a person you just met describing their colonoscopy.
It’s really the secondary characters who add a bit more shine to the story, from Alick, the perpetually drunk yet still responsible groundskeeper in Ballanish, to the Ambassadress, a constant antagonist to Letty. These characters aren’t any more fleshed out than the main characters, but are more interesting by far and bring a little life and change of pace to an otherwise dreary story.
Although the premise of The Summer of the Bear promises a story of political intrigue and a touch of whimsy, the real thing is gray, dull, and far too long. 2 out of 5 stars.
A diplomat in the Cold War is dead: suspected suicide, suspected traitor. His family—a wife, two daughters, and a son—attempt to adjust to a new life out in the Hebrides. The wife, Letty, struggles to reconcile herself to the fact that her husband’s country thinks he’s a traitor. Each child—Georgiana, 17; Alba, 14; and Jamie, 8—have their own difficulties understanding why their father is dead. And somehow, among it all, a wrestling bear has escaped from its handler and is roaming the Scottish countryside, looking for something.
Style and Technique:
The Summer of the Bear is written in the third person, alternating between the current story and flashbacks. Writing for two timelines can often add an extra level of intrigue to a story as the past and the present attempt to reconcile themselves, but Pollen handles this technique very clumsily, and it comes off as disorganized. The story will spend a chapter or two in the Hebrides before switching to Bonn for a chapter spent in flashback, which is a solid method of comparing two timelines. However, there are several points during the chapter set in the present where the narrative will, with little or no warning, switch to flashback, jolting the reader out of the story’s flow and necessitating a recalibration.
The story itself is often quite unnecessary: a hundred pages could have easily been cut from the final draft without much of an impact having been made. It seems that the reader is often reading a rehashing of something that the story has already been over once or twice, and the narrative is weighted down to a near-death crawl towards the middle of the novel. The pace picks up again two-thirds of the way through the book, only to slow down again at the beginning of the climax all the way through the denouement. It does answer the questions posed by the narrative (was it suicide or murder? What happened in East Germany? Why the bear?), but does so slowly and sometimes in an unsatisfying manner. Although plenty of time passes during the book, the characters all seem to be stuck focused on one thing, and never able to move beyond it or think of anything else.
Pollen’s strength lies in her descriptive abilities. You can see the windswept moors of Ballanish, the area of the Hebrides in which the present part of the story is set, smell the cold tang of the sea, and hear the symphony of crashing waves and calling seabirds. Bonn, a city in Germany where much of the flashback timeline takes place, is sharply contrasted. It seems to be illustrated in shades of grey, which give off the strong sense of physical and societal restrictions that were placed on Letty while she and her children lived there as the family of a diplomat, no easy position to be in.
Characterization:
Pollen has several characters to keep track of, and she establishes each of them with their own specific trait, but just one. Letty is the grieving mother, cold and distanced from her children. Georgiana is the sexually frustrated seventeen-year-old, sole witness to the clandestine mission her father undertook on the other side of the Iron Curtain that’s caused so much suspicion to be posthumously piled on him. Alba is the poisonous adolescent with murder in every thought, and irrational in every action. Jamie is the innocent boy with a painful naïveté towards every situation he finds himself in, to the point where the reader must question whether they were that oblivious at age eight.
These characters have evolved, to some extent, by the end of the novel, but it’s done in a jerky or unbelievable manner (for example, Georgiana’s character development happens entirely at the hands of a character who is never mentioned again after they’ve fulfilled their purpose as her catalyst). Letty, although (understandably) the one most fixated on her husband’s death, is the most dynamic and three-dimensional character, although within the context of this book, these terms must be used loosely. Furthermore, although the characterization could be described as sparse, the author does provide the reader with very sudden, very intimate details in a manner that comes across as a person you just met describing their colonoscopy.
It’s really the secondary characters who add a bit more shine to the story, from Alick, the perpetually drunk yet still responsible groundskeeper in Ballanish, to the Ambassadress, a constant antagonist to Letty. These characters aren’t any more fleshed out than the main characters, but are more interesting by far and bring a little life and change of pace to an otherwise dreary story.
Although the premise of The Summer of the Bear promises a story of political intrigue and a touch of whimsy, the real thing is gray, dull, and far too long. 2 out of 5 stars.