Shelf Awareness--Polar Bear

PB Review: Polar Bear

Polar Bear by Candace Fleming, illus. by Eric Rohmann (Neal Porter Books, 32p., ages 4-8, 9780823449163, November 22, 2022)

Polar Bear wisely and effectively brings climate change into focus while closely following one family of polar bears as they struggle to survive in a harsh, warming climate.

It's "April in the Arctic" and "temperatures barely nudge above freezing" when a mother polar bear and her two cubs emerge from their den beneath the snow. Mother has survived on stored fat for five months, gestating and then nursing her young, and now she's hungry and ready to hunt. Day by day, she teaches her cubs about the world outside their den, until it's time to travel "home to the ice" along a trail she used with her own mother, the same one "her cubs will take when they are grown."

The trip is long and dangerous, but the family finally arrives at "ice-covered Hudson Bay." Mother hunts while babies watch and learn. Weeks pass as the bear family gorges and gains weight, but they're in a race against time to fatten up before "summer's lean months." When the ice has melted, "seals are almost impossible to catch in open water," and this year "too much ice is melting too soon." The odds of survival are difficult in the best of times, as "only one in ten hunts succeed," and now the ice, so necessary for these bears "to hunt and eat and survive," is being depleted by warming temperatures in the Arctic.

Polar Bear is yet another wondrous collaboration from the Sibert Medal-winning team of Candace Fleming and Eric Rohmann (Honeybee). Fleming masterfully builds suspense, and her text will have readers rooting hard for this family of bears as they struggle to find food and grapple with climate change. Her lovely, lilting prose accompanies Caldecott Medalist Rohmann's breathtaking oil illustrations, which include an effective double gatefold showing the struggling bears adrift after ice melts too early. Back matter explains how polar bears have adapted to their arctic climate and brings home the need to keep climate change at bay, including a section on how readers can help.

Polar Bear, with text both informative and lyrical and achingly beautiful illustration, issues a hopeful call to action. The young bears survive two seasons of hardship and hunting with their mother and are eventually old enough to separate and "walk on, alone, beneath the Arctic sky, along familiar paths, at home on the ice." --Lynn Becker, reviewer, blogger, and children's book author.