Review: 'Bear'

Bear
By Julia Phillips
Literary Fiction
Hogarth
June 2024

Once upon a time, two sisters took care of their terminally ill mother and waited for the day they could leave their life of minimum-wage despair. Bear by Julia Phillips relates the fairy tale of what one sister, Sam, has believed for most of her life. And what happened when a bear came to their Friday Harbor, Washington, home.

Bear is indeed a fairy tale, a tale about the stories we tell ourselves. Sam has a job she hates, working concessions on a state ferry. She serves coffee, chowder and snacks to cranky customers. She works for a company with a food service contract, so she doesn't even get the benefits of a state job.

Her beautiful princess of a sister, Elena, has worked at the local country club since graduating high school. The sisters spend their time working and, when not, taking care of their mother. Her heart and lungs have been deteriorating for years. Their home, first occupied by their grandparents, is slowly falling apart. But Elena has promised that when their mother has passed, they will sell the house and its five acres, leave the San Juan Islands and live the good life.

Within a couple years, their mother got sick, and so the stories they made up with each other shifted. A town where they were strangers to their neighbors. A garden of their own with two rosebushes, white and red, that they would have the time to indulge in tending.

The dreaming helped. It had since they were children, wondering about the answers to the questions no adults in their life would address. It helped them make sense of what they could not, in everyday life, fathom. When they were teens and their house became unbearable, they went out into the woods, so they could lie on the cool earth between hemlock trees and imagine being elsewhere. Needles shivered over them. Meteors streaked across the sky. The moon, when it was full, was a hole in the darkness, an open door to another world.

Sam is counting on that story. She doesn't have friends, she doesn't know how relationships work. Still, there are good things in her life. Some she recognizes, such as the beauty of where they live and the quiet moments she shares with her sister and mother. And there is a fellow who works on the ferry with her who she pushes away when perhaps she should not.

On one ferry run, she sees a bear swimming alongside the boat. It is a glorious sight that fills Sam with wonder.

Sam had seen it herself: the wet, furred hump of the animal's back, the line of its neck, its pointed nose and small round ears. The water was silver and the sky was dimming blue, and the creature, against those colors, was a dark spot, but the last light in the air outlined its form, made it clear and shocking and strange.

It's not so wonderful when, a few days later, she discovers a huge scat left on their front walk. Yup, it was from the bear. And then Sam and Elena see the bear sitting on their sidewalk. Just sitting there before ambling off.

The girls grew up wandering the island. But this bear hanging around nearby is something different. Elena feels it is a magical sign. She is enamored of the bear, as if it was a prince in disguise who will change their lives. As the bear lingers instead of moving on, as the wildlife experts tell the sisters will happen, Elena becomes more convinced there is destiny at play.

The isolation of the sisters is an integral part of the story. There are some characters that appear they may be heroes, if not quite knights in shining armor. But more often than not, their conviction that they should fly under the radar and not reach out for help is the best plan. Because they don't want to get burned again.

The tales they tell each other and themselves are a large aspect of what makes Bear powerful storytelling. So is the setting, portrayed as well by Phillips as she portrays her characters. Bear has the magic of counting on love, the magic of a magical place, and the magic that darkness brings.

Sam may think of herself as unlovable and unlikeable, and she certainly works at it, but her inner strength propels Bear to a realistic happy ending, or at least the chance of one.