Review: Bear

Beginning with Disappearing Earth, Julia Phillips has demonstrated that she has a talent for stories exploring complicated family bonds in settings that are so strange they seem otherworldly. With her latest work, Bear, Phillips transports us to the island of San Juan off the coast of Washington State. I might be weird, but I find Washington’s islands kind of magical anyway. I don’t typically think of islands in the Pacific Northwest. They have more of a tropical association.

Phillips’s story mainly unfolds through the younger of two sisters, Sam. She believes she has a pact with her older sister, Elena, to save up money, sell the house they currently share with their ailing mother, and move to the mainland to start a new life. The dream of starting fresh somewhere with her sister is what gets Sam through double shifts as she rides the ferry in circles every day starting from Friday Harbor on San Juan going to Anacortes, and back. The food stays the same. The staff on the boat stay the same, and her neighbors on the island stay the same. While some people would feel comforted by this stability, especially in the light of her mother’s terminal illness, it’s monotony for Sam.

One evening, as Sam is riding back to her home port, she sees a bear swimming alongside the ferry. As the story progresses, the bear starts making routine appearances near Sam and Elena’s home. While this initially is fascinating and energizing for these young women, Sam begins to see the bear as a threat both to her and her sisters’ lives as well as to her future plans. Elena appears to have an emotional connection with the bear and Sam worries that this could create a link to the island that Elena won’t be able to break or that the bear might kill her sister.

Throughout Bear, Phillips explores the tension between craving change and renewal as well as fearing the change that cannot be controlled. At the beginning of the story, the sisters are still reeling from the financial disruptions the COVID pandemic brought to their streams of income as well as their mother’s deteriorating health. The family is literally and figuratively “stuck” in financial and relationship cycles without much choice in what changes and what remains the same.

For Sam, having an escape plan is what she has clung to like a life raft since adolescence. As the situation shifts Sam discovers parts of her sister’s life that were previously hidden from her, she is forced to question what is in store for her and what creating her own life might look like.

With heartbreaking precise prose, Phillips guides us through a young woman’s journey through the trials of becoming an independent adult who moves from dreaming to doing even when she feels her most broken and alone. This is a lovely, bizarre, and healing story and it is such a gift to anyone who reads it.

If you meet a man, a bear, and this book in the woods, choose Bear.

Bear: A Novel by Julia Phillips

Published by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House

2024