Moody and affecting ... Riding shotgun for the next 270 sparely written pages with such a brittle protagonist proves wearying ... The suspense rises in the last third, when, eschewing the Disneyfication of fairy tales, and cleverly hewing to the darker weirdness of an actual Grimm tale... Phillips rolls out one last, haunting symbol for the bear to embody — the mysterious bonds and dangerous fissures of sisterhood. This gives the novel its slow-burning power.
May remind readers of Alice Hoffman’s fantasy-flecked novels, and Phillips sprinkles around the fairy dust liberally in some sections ... All this is spun with an ever-tightening weave of dread. Wisely, Phillips keeps her book relatively short and uses the story’s narrow focus to emphasize the sisters’ physical isolation. Even the novel’s young-adult tone, which feels cloying at first, soon reveals itself as wholly intentional, a reflection of Sam’s arrested development exacerbated by those two years of covid stasis. Impoverished, alienated and desperately lonely, she’s retreated further than she realizes into a world of fragile hope. When that shatters, as it must, the situation becomes more erratic and dangerous than you know what.
It’s Phillips’ mastery of the world she’s created that firmly roots the reader inside these characters’ psyches — and their story ... Vivid ... An intimate look at misery and what it means to feel unhinged.
Reading Phillips’s second novel, Bear, was a disappointing experience — at least its first half, before she does something amazing ... The problem begins with the story’s worn-out premise ... Cliché after cliché, yes, but the most disappointing aspect is that the prose is flat, whereas Phillips’s language in her first novel had an undercurrent of electricity, honed to sparkling perfection ... As the bear’s presence grows in the sisters’ lives, Phillips turns on the electricity, sharpening her language as she compresses the tension, funneling the story into a truly riveting ending. In fact, it makes me question whether those flaws are flaws at all, and not some masterful rope-a-dope trick to lower our guard so we’d get gobsmacked by what she conjures for the finale. For when it arrives, the ending is so captivating, so thrilling, so on par with the writing of her first novel, that it retroactively makes her second well worth reading.
Vivid descriptions...add luster to this brooding yet incisive tale. Phillips paints a striking picture of the charred landscape that remains after everything else burns to the ground.
Taut brilliance ... A fast-moving river—smooth on the surface but churning underneath—and sisters Sam and Elena are caught in its inexorable current as they wrestle with conflicting hopes for the future.
There’s a taut energy, a quickness to the language that contrasts the richness of landscape with the intensity of humans struggling in myriad ways to survive, let alone thrive. It’s a novel that asks to be read in a single sitting: it’s short, carefully paced, language-driven. Just as Elena and Sam can’t look away from the bear, it’s hard to look away from this story that unfolds in deft, surprising, unexpected ways.
Concerns a pair of sisters in a gorgeously evoked, off-the-beaten-track setting, this time with a close focus on the complicated psychology of the sibling relationship ... Phillips flexes her writerly finesse and insight, creating a postadolescent working-class heroine full of resentment at all the monied people surrounding her, deeply dependent on her sister, and suspicious of everyone else. The division between the sisters is sharpened by secrets and past trauma that emerge slowly, then explode. A bold and brilliant modern fable of sisterhood, class, and our relationship to the natural world.
