Pearly Everlasting (2024) by Tammy Armstrong

🐻 Pearly Everlasting is a Gothic woodland story, inspired by a true account of a woman nursing a bear cub alongside her daughter, which was captured by a photographer. Set in New Brunswick, Canada during the Great Depression of 1930s, the story depicted a logging camp dwellers. Pearly Everlasting is the daughter of the cook, and she had been brought up alongside a bear, whom her mother named Bruno. To Pearly, an only child, Bruno is not just a pet, he's her brother. The result was rather unsettling - at least for me. A bear should be treated as a bear. In this story, Bruno is spoiled by the family, so much so that he resembled more of a spoiled brat than an animal - pet or wild.

🐻 All the residents of the camp has been accepting Bruno as Pearly's pet. But one day, a mean supervisor was in charge to supervise the logging, and he hated Bruno. He attempted to buy and kidnapped Bruno, but failed as all the camp residents stand for Pearly's family. Then one day the supervisor was found dead - by pearly, no less - and Bruno was suspected as the murderer. When someone attempted to poison him, Pearly decided that she can't stay put any longer, and brought Bruno away. Tammy Armstrong brings us to an adventure through the snowy parts of Canada, introduced to some eccentric people such as the Song Catcher - a woman who travels cross country to collect folklore songs, and sells them to public. The adventure is also Pearly's chance to experience life outside the camp. The question is, would she eventually return to the camp? And what would happen to Bruno? Could the world normalize a girl who lives alongside a bear?

🐻 The main attraction of the story, besides Bruno, is the poetic style in which Tammy Armstrong wrote it. Unfortunately, that is also the one that put it off for me. Somehow, I couldn't relate to the story (nor the characters). To me, this is a beautiful narration, but void of a warmth which good stories usually bring to our hearts. The idea of a woman suckling a bear alongside her daughter was too much for me - I mean, why? Why not treat the bear as a bear? Is Bruno meant to be the book's attraction - a cute bear cub behaves like a boy? Well, it fails to do that. He's not cute at all; at time he's even annoying. And I couldn't relate to Pearly either. On the whole the story felt like watching a weird movie from afar. And maybe, the narrator (I listened to the audiobook) failed to enliven the story. Partly due to her droning voice, and partly, I guess, because it's half poem and half prose (which I realized, must be quite difficult to narrate). In the end, I couldn't like it; I even stopped listening after 75%. I felt like I couldn't be bother anymore whether Pearly and Bruno made it back to the camp or not.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐