Little Bear

Review also includes:

Father Bear Comes Home, 978-1782955054

For an older reviewer like me it’s difficult to be objective when titles like this reappear. To my mind, Little Bear, alongside Frog and Toad, Dr Seuss, the Berensteins and for the UK, Ahlberg’s Happy Families titles, are the classic beginner reader books. Each in their own way makes brilliant use of a restricted vocabulary and necessary repetition of words and phrases, aided by outstanding illustration, to create something uniquely delightful for younger readers. If Seuss and Ahlberg depend on the zany and exaggerated, then Little Bear and Frog and Toad are the opposite, their careful dialogue – and the story is largely carried by conversation – gently evoking the characters and the relationships between them. Little Bear is about family. It’s a classic 1950s family, although Sendak’s illustrations hark back to an earlier nineteenth century golden age. Little Bear is at home with a cooking and cleaning Mother Bear; and Father Bear is either out in the world, and possibly returning with a mermaid, or a settled paterfamilias in his armchair with his newspaper, wearing a curious tassled pillbox hat. But the mention of the mermaid (and there’s a princess, a Viking ship and a trip to the moon, too) reminds us that these are stories above all about a child’s, or a little bear’s, imagination in which Little Bear, Cat, Dog and Owl can all be friends, have a birthday party and go fishing together. Sendak’s illustrations, in which Little Bear and his family alone are on two legs and just the adults are clothed, offers not only this clever gradation of the anthropomorphic but an apparently effortless portrayal of character and mood. For me, as ever, these have to be five star books.