The Girl Who Speaks Bear

Sophie Anderson's The Girl Who Speaks Bear is a snow-forest adventure for 10 year olds about a girl who was found standing in the snow outside a bear cave, aged two, and has never stopped wondering why.

What happens

Yanka is twelve and taller than every other child in her village. Taller than most of the grown-ups too. She's stronger than the ice-cutters and the wood-choppers, and she has grown so fast this winter that her legs hurt at night and she has outgrown three pairs of skating boots.

Everyone calls her Yanka the Bear. She doesn't mind it exactly. It just reminds her, every single time, how different she is.

Because everyone else in that village was born there, and so were their parents and their grandparents. They wear coats handed down from great-grandfathers. Yanka doesn't know where she was born, or who her parents were, or how she ended up in that cave.

She calls the not-knowing a hole inside her that gets a little wider every year. That line will stay with your reader.

The village is getting ready for the festival that ends six months of winter. Yanka hauls logs for the bonfire and holds up beams for the carpenters, because that's what she's good for. Her best friend Sasha is stacking wood for the fire.

There's a lovely bit where she goes over to a group of children she's known her whole life and finds herself slouching and bending her knees to fit in. She says she feels like a cuckoo chick in a nest of wrens.

The whole book sounds like that. Yanka tells it herself, in the present tense, and it's honestly beautiful. Snow, frost, trees she can hear whispering. It never shows off though. Every picture in it is something a child standing in a forest would really notice.

And the forest keeps pulling at her. She can feel it doing it. She gets halfway up the hill towards it before she notices she's walked away from everyone.

Something to think about before you start. The whole story runs on being left as a baby and not knowing who your people are. Yanka says out loud that she hopes her past turns out to be something more magical than being unwanted. If your child is adopted or fostered, or there's anything like that in your family, this could be exactly the right book or a very hard one. You'll know which.

What to read next

The Wolf Wilder would make a good one after this. Feo lives in a Russian wood with her mother, teaching tamed wolves how to be wild again, and it opens with somebody knocking at a door that nobody ever knocks at.