PositiveThe Barnes & Noble Review\"Would it be churlish, then, to say that there’s something bearish about Memoirs of a Polar Bear? Something playful but not quite friendly, something gruff and strange. The book is neither a fantasy of wildness nor a parable of civilization but something in between, a border creature, domesticated but hardly naturalized. In defiance of the novel’s drive toward climax and resolution, and equally in defiance of memoir’s tendency to tell all and ask for absolution (or grant it), Tawada’s bears tell more or less the same story three times in a row: the passage from the incoherent sensations of infancy to the formed consciousness of the mature animal, from mutism to speech.\
