A review by angelayoung
Do Not Feed the Bear by Rachel Elliott

4.0

Do Not Feed the Bear is a novel in many voices: the characters' voices, naturally (and they are very natural), but also the voice of a dog called Stuart (whose sense of smell tells him which humans he likes or dislikes); the voice of a felt hare called Blood and the voice of a blue notebook. Which, you might think, would make for a noisy book. But Do Not Feed the Bear isn't noisy at all. It's a gentle, quirky, poignant, thoughtful and, in the end, uplifting story about human beings who, for different reasons, are a bit stuck or a bit lost or a bit (or very) unhappy, or all three. It's also the story of how they, often with the help of others, unearth their troubles, face them and find their way through.

Rachel Elliott is a psychotherapist and her understanding of and compassion for the way we are and the difficulties we find ourselves in thread their subtle ways through her characters. I knew immediately I was reading the lives of real people. Well, obviously, real invented people. But their dialogue and their language, their quirks and their difficulties, their observations, their attractions and the things that make them happy and the things that make them sad are grounded in real human experience.

One character remembers an article about confidence she read, once:

You don't have to wait until you're confident before you do something scary, the article said. You don't have to be ready, in fact that's the wrong way round. Confidence only comes when you do the thing that scares you. It's a by-product of action, not a place from which to act.

And the same characters says, later on:

Without hope all we have is nostalgia.

Characters who wonder about such things are characters well worth finding out about, don't you think?