When I finished reading, I put the book down and said to my daughter, “I would be so sad if you spent half the year away from me. The soft peach glow of the sunset, the flowing fluorescence of the Northern Lights, only make the pain of his choice, of his parents’ loss, even sharper. He loves both his father and mother, so eventually he decides to spend half the year as a human and half as a bear. The boy then must choose: “He felt that his heart was torn.” One day, when he is 7, the same age as my daughter, the boy gets lost in the snow and is reunited with his bear family. The mother bear cries over the loss of her cub and the tears etch scars onto her face. In the book we have checked out most recently, “The Ice Bear,” a polar bear cub is separated from his mother, transformed into a boy, and raised for many years by human parents. She knows that the polar bears’ existence is precarious, that their home is being destroyed. I laugh because she’s right, I am fussy, but I also take it as a rebuke. They like to be clean - “Fussy,” my daughter says, “like you.” Their feet are large to help distribute their heavy load on thin ice. They have long necks for poking into holes. Their favorite food is seal, though they will eat just about anything if necessary, including fish, berries and nuts. Polar bears, I can tell you, live on land but spend a lot of time hunting in water. Over time, I have checked out every book from the library with a polar bear on the cover. Monomaniacal in that way children can be, she knows all about polar bears, and now, I guess, so do I.
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