Finding Bear

Finding Bear by Hannah Gold is an Arctic adventure for 9 year olds about a girl who has never got over saying goodbye to a polar bear.

What happens

Seventeen months on, April Wood is home and everything is slightly wrong. New house by the sea, red brick, hard square corners, an electric fire with pretend logs that glow when you flick a switch. Dad loves it. It's so easy to keep clean.

April would much rather be outside. She sits in the garden listening to the silence, which she thinks carries all sorts of messages if you've learned how to listen properly.

School is not going well. She gave a presentation about polar bears that took her ages, and the class yawned through it.

So she did her best roar to wake them up. Then she explained that she can smell peanut butter from a mile away. Now they make bear noises at her from the back of the room and call her Bear Girl, and not in a kind way.

The local paper made it worse. The reporter got her name wrong (Alice!) and gave the captain of the ship the credit for saving Bear.

This is the bit that will land with your reader. April isn't after praise. She just wants one single person to take her seriously.

She carries a photo of herself and Bear in her breast pocket, zipped up tight, pressed against her heart. In the shoe cupboard she's kept a pair of rainbow wellies that stopped fitting ages ago, because she's fairly sure they still smell of the Arctic.

Meanwhile Dad frets about her constantly, and she hasn't the heart to tell him she still has no proper friends. Making friends with humans, she's decided, is much harder than making friends with polar bears.

Then news comes out of Svalbard. Somebody has shot a polar bear and wounded it. April is completely certain it's Bear, and she talks her dad into taking her north.

One to be aware of. A polar bear being shot is what sets the whole journey off, and there's a cub in trouble later on too. So if your reader really feels it when an animal is hurt, go in knowing that.

If they're the sort who would get on a boat themselves to go and check, they'll be with April every step.

It's also the second book about April and Bear. Her first trip to Bear Island is The Last Bear, in the library too, if yours would rather start at the beginning.

What to read next

And if what gets them is a child and an animal who belong together being pulled apart, Pax is the one to reach for afterwards. Peter's dad makes him give his fox back to the wild, and Peter has no intention of leaving it at that.