Book Review: Touching Spirit Bear

Touching Spirit Bear

Ben Mikaelsen

Scholastic, 2001

Source: my classroom library
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Ben Mikaelsen takes us on a journey along with Cole Matthews as he confronts his demons in Touching Spirit Bear.  Cole is angry.  Very angry.  He's angry enough that he beat the you know what out of a kid for ratting on him.  That kid, Peter Driscal, is now in the hospital and Cole has found himself in a juvenile detention center as he awaits sentencing.  But there is an alternative, a chance to change.  Through Circle Justice, a healing practice that focuses on the healing of both parties instead of just the punishment of one, Cole is sent to an Alaskan island to spend a year in solitude.  But is that enough for Cole Matthews?  Can he really change just from spending a year on his own in the wilderness? Can he even survive?

I read this books years ago and it's always been at the back of my mind for some of my students.  Although I have sixth graders and Cole Matthews is fifteen years old, some of the anger I see bottled up at times reminds me of him.  I have been thinking about sharing this with them and finally jumped in, reading carefully through it in order to prepare my read alouds.

One of the parts that I really appreciate about this book is the symbolism that is rampant throughout the first part.  Cole's anger is always smoldering under the surface until there is an explosion.  The references to fire and heat and anger are all mixed up in the first half of the book (in a good way).  As a class we'll start keeping track of these instances and then I'll have them draw a picture of Cole's anger, hoping that they all include fire of some sort in their drawing. 

There is also the chance for change.  Cole has the possibility for change.  He is given a chance to make his life better and to make up for the things that he has done to others.  It's up to him to take that chance and make it his own.  As one of the characters in the book says, healing is much more difficult than being punished, and Cole is about to learn that.  It's not just his change we see, but we also see the transformation of other characters who are connected to Cole as they witness everything that takes place in his life.  

While Cole is on the island he spots a large white bear, a spirit bear.  They supposedly don't live on the island and no one has ever spotted one anywhere near the island before, but Cole sees one.  The spirit bear encompasses so much of what Cole is experiencing while on the island and seems to reflect his own spirit.  

It's easy to get caught up in Cole's attitude and his anger and to go along with what he's feeling.  At the same time, you're just as angry with him as everyone is and you can't stand how he blames everyone around him.  

Ben Mikaelsen has shown us that surviving can be more than just about making it through nature, but about surviving your emotions and surviving life.  He gives kids a look at what is possible, even if you are a juvenile delinquent and angry at the entire world.  I enjoyed reading this again and hope that my students will also enjoy reading it.

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Book Review: Our Endless Numbered Days

Our Endless Numbered Days
Claire Fuller
Tin House Books, 2015
Source: purchased
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

In Our Endless Numbered Days, Claire Fuller presents a beautiful landscape where young Peggy grows up in an isolated cabin with her father.  They left from their London home and traveled to this far away destination when she was only eight and she believes the rest of the world was destroyed. Peggy grows up knowing only what her father tells her, believing they are the only ones left in this world, until she sees evidence of someone else alive in their lonely little world. Coupled with chapters from the present where Peggy is back home in London with her mother, it is evident right away that there is something very wrong.

I had a difficult time with this book because the descriptions of the scenery went on and on.  Although they were beautiful, I found myself skipping over some of those and getting to the sections where something was happening.  Anything.  The beginning of the book was also hard to get through.  It describes her time at home with her father before they left London for the cabin in the woods, but there was an awful lot of background being built in.  From the beginning I knew there was something very very wrong--even more than what is revealed from the blurb on the back.

It wasn't until about halfway through that I even felt the need to get to the end.  I did have an idea of what the "surprise reveal" was pretty early on in the story.  So although I needed to understand how things went down, I was hoping the entire time that I was wrong.  The reveal wasn't even much of a reveal by the time I got to those last two pages.  That's right folks.  You get two pages to deal with this.  And it's intense enough that more than two pages is needed to process everything.  This is coming from someone who guessed it pretty early on.  The ending just soured the entire story for me and what would have been an okay book, became a not great book.  It felt like a desperate attempt at shocking me, even when it didn't (although the reveal is shocking in itself, I wasn't surprised because I had been worried about it from early on).  I felt like someone was trying to trick me, only not very well.

As for the characters, Peggy is stuck in her eight year old understanding of life.  She questions her father, but not quite in the way a 17 year old would.  She still thinks of her best friend from childhood as an eight year old girl and her feelings for her best friend are very childish.  Yet she's living in the body of a seventeen year old girl and not quite understanding everything that she should.  There is a lot that I'm still not sure about with Peggy.

Despite her father being a major catalyst for so much and being the only character Peggy has interactions with for most of the novel, he was almost a side character--but not quite.  He seems to be suffering from bipolar disorder, but if it's truly that or if these manic and depressive episodes are brought on more by their situation I'm not sure.  He did seem to get obsessed with ideas even before he took Peggy out to the wilderness, though.  Nonetheless, he just seemed to be there, something she had to deal with and figure out in order to survive.

Our Endless Numbered Days, although written beautiful, has some pretty big flaws that all come at you in the end.  This one might be finding its way into the donate pile.

Image Source: Goodreads


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Prisoner B-3087

Based on the true story of Jack Gruener, Alan Gratz has created a fictional account of Jack’s time spent in ten different concentration camps during the Holocaust.  His depictions of the ghettos, train cars, camp barracks, death marches, torture, and death are very honest.  He has described horrid conditions that no human should have to witness, let alone live through, without sensationalism. 

Yanek Gruener is a Jewish boy growing up in Poland in the 1930’s when the Nazis take over.  Under their rule his life changes dramatically as he undergoes one tragedy after another.  Although he manages to survive ten concentration camps and two death marches, Yanek is not always optimistic.  After a while, the death he sees is just commonplace.  He is terrified of it, determined not let it take him, but accepts it because there is no other option.  At times he wonders if it is better to dead. 

I appreciated how Yanek was portrayed.  Written in a first person narrative, it allows the reader to enter the story a little more, but you’re still kept at bay with the very clipped style of writing.  At the end, after he and his fellow survivors have been rescued by American soldiers, Yanek notes that “They couldn’t understand our tears, couldn’t know how amazing such a simple meal was to us….We could describe it.  Describe in every detail the horrors of the camps and the way we were treated.  But no one who had not been there would ever truly understand (251).”