Like subsequent installments, this first title contains four stories, each of which gently highlights some reality of child life.
Gentle and reassuring, they are also wonderfully and subtly humorous, offering a perfectly realized depiction of a young child's interaction with the people and places in his own small world. Why was Mother Bear always fully dressed? Even in the story where Little Bear's mother tells her son that he really does not need a coat, that his pelt is his coat and his covering, she herself is fully clothed (and in a full length dress at that).Įlse Holmelund Minarik's five Little Bear books, which followed their eponymous ursine hero through some of the adventures of childhood, were one of the staples of my own personal library as a girl, and I recall reading them over and over again, until my copies fell apart. However, there is one thing I found strange then, and still consider a bit strange now with regard to Little Bear. And truth be told, I actually was more than a bit embarrassed and even rather angry at having to read a book such as this, such as Little Bear at the age of ten, seeing that I was reading advanced children's literature in German before we immigrated to Canada, but Little Bear really did much improve my English and both Else Minarik's narrative and Maurice Sendak's illustrations also were just so incredibly sweet and evocative that I absolutely did fall in love with Little Bear, his mother and the other characters. My sister (who was five at the time) received the book as a present when she started grade one in September 1976, but I ended up hijacking it for a while, as I wanted to practice reading English and Little Bear was at that time just the right level of difficulty for me. Yes, I vaguely but nostalgically do remember Else Holmelund Minarik's Little Bear from the time we immigrated from Germany to Canada when I was ten. This is one of the books from James Mustich's 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die A Life-Changing List. Of course, if you are going to read this, you definitely have to do the voices for Little Bear, Mother Bear, and all of the animals. Little Bear also comes off as a bit whiny. It felt a bit like the author wrote a book leveraging animals with the hope that using animals would carry the book. This book had decent illustrations, but it didn't have the same magic as Winnie the Pooh. Perhaps he was killed by hunters off page because we never hear from him. I'm not sure what happened to Daddy Bear. Little Bear is a collection of four short stories which focuses primarily on Little Bear, his animals friends, and Mother Bear.
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