Customer Reviews

Chasing the Bear: A Young Spenser Novel

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I think it is fair to say that I am a huge Robert B. Parker fan. That disclaimer having been allowed, let me say that Chasing the Bear, A Young Spenser novel, sets just the right tone for the adventures of the sleuth later in life. Told in flashbacks, it sports the themes familiar to all of Dr. Parker's fans. That of honor, keeping one's word and standing up for what's right. The fact that the Spenser in this quest is 14 years old is unremarkable for the attributes that make him the Spenser his public loves today are well grounded in substance. I had always wondered how this telling of background would have been accomplished. Yet accomplish it Parker does, with great aplomb.

The characters are fresh, but if you are expecting to see a young Hawk, or Quirk or Belson or Susan Silverman, you will be disappointed. Yet for a fourteen year old to read Chasing the Bear and leap to The Godwulf Manuscript is a pretty big leap. Hopefully, there will be a few more "Young Spenser" books dealing with his move to Boston, his time in the Army and his adventures with the staties before he became a private license.

I highly recommend this book and have purchased a copy of this book for my godson. Then its over to Edenville Owls and The Boxer and the Spy. One last thing, perhaps the vocabulary isn't as intense as a regular Spenser novel, but Robert B.Parker honors his audience by not talking down to them. No surprise there.

I am a huge Spenser fan so I was really looking forward to this "novel" to get a glimpse into Spenser's early life. I was hoping for something new and fresh and unfortunately didn't find either.

First of all when I opened the book and saw the usual 1 1/2 line spacing and extra-wide margins I felt cheated. This tactic of fattening up a book to make it look more substantial than it is is extremely annoying. Secondly, this product is not a novel at all. It is simply a set of a few reminiscences that could have easily been folded into a regular Spenser novel. In fact two of the reminiscences had already been told in previous Spenser novels: the story of the bear and the story of how his father and his uncles disciplined a group of men who had harrassed young Spenser. There is no beginning, middle and end to this "novel". There is no conflict, there is no resolution, it is simple preachy. Parker fans have a right to expect something better from him. If he's at all concerned about his legacy he needs to continue to give us new material with each new publication and when he can no longer do so he should stop while his status as a best-selling author (with cause)is still intact. I'm still planning to read the next one which I believe is due out in October but I'm not going to buy any more of his books without previewing them through library copies first.

Spenser sits on a park bench relating his early history to his one true love, Susan Silverman.

No, it's not Robert Parker's take on Forest Gump. It's his attempt to explain Spenser the man by looking at Spenser the boy. Susan asks questions, Spenser answers them and we cut to the past to see Spenser being raised by his father and two uncles. We are shown an important incident from Spenser's boyhood and then we jump back to the park bench. Susan analyzes/interprets what we've just witnessed. There is some banter and then we're back in the past.

This is the structure of the novel and at times I wanted more. I really enjoyed those leaps back in time and I would have appreciated more detail and less park bench banter. Some of these flashbacks are vignettes. The missing details are filled in during the park bench scenes. I would have liked these vignettes to be expanded so that there would be no need to add missing details during the Spenser and Susan bits.

The glimpses we get of Spenser as a 14 year old boy - dealing with an alcoholic man who has kidnapped his daughter and with a race-based attack on a fellow student - are classic Spenser. He does what he does because he has no other choice. His code (taught to him by his three fathers) demands that he do what's right, even if he isn't exactly sure just what is right.

If the book has a flaw, it's that too much time is spent on that park bench. I really wanted more detail during the flashbacks. The park bench analysis seemed to interrupt the natural flow of the story. But I have to add that it didn't slow the story down by much. I read this book on my Kindle in under an hour and it met my all-time test for an engrossing work of fiction. When I reached the end of a chapter, I looked up and saw that I had missed my bus stop. Any book that makes me forget where I am gets an above average rating. With less park bench banter, I'd have given it five stars.

The ending of this book is also quite touching. I think it illustrates why I don't tire of Spenser and Susan (even when they annoy me - I mean, how many times are we going to be told how small a bite Susan takes during a meal?) and why I'm looking forward to more adventures of the early Spenser.

If you like Spenser, you'll probably like this book. If you've never read his tales before, you may want to pick up a few early novels and then come back to this after you've been hooked.

KINDLE SPECIFIC
There are a couple of spots where hyphens have been left in words so they are spelled oddly when the text reflows. It's a very minor annoyance.

This is supposed to be a YA book, and was shelved by the library as such. I've been a bit in love with Spenser (does he even HAVE a first name?!) since Robert Urich played him on TV and the books never discouraged me. So I picked it up.

As a Spenser fan it was a satisfying little read--a nice glimpse into the heretofore only vaguely mentioned youth of my favorite PI. As a YA book it is-hate to say it-a miserable failure.

To start, it is framed as Spenser telling Susan about his youth. They make enough lovey-dovey comments that you get the high points: they've been together a while and she's a Jewish princess turned shrink. From a YA perspective: boring. No tween/teen wants to read about someone talking about their childhood adventures, especially not in Parker's spare, dialogue-driven style.

There is action, and a decent amount of it, but it is strung together loosely and lacks a solid narrative framework. Basically, it's a series of incidents strung together with questions from Susan, like a brief Q&A in book form.

I also found the young Spenser unbelievable. He sounded too much like the adult Spenser. Almost no one sounds the same as a kid and an adult. If they do, it's usually a childish pattern that stuck rather than an adult-too-young persona.

I liked it, but I don't think it succeeded as a teen book, it just relies too heavily on the reader already having a solid idea of who these people are.

This sounds mean, and I hate that because I did enjoy the book. I just don't think the story ended up being what it set out to be.

Don't get me wrong; it's appropriate for teenagers, is well written and compelling, but my son, whom the book is pitched to, has never heard of Spenser, so making it a series of flashbacks in a conversation with Susan would leave him confused. I read it because I like everything Parker has written and this is no exception. Though I was getting deja-vu wondering if I'd read it before... I think the first two flashbacks were in another book.

The cover threw me off, too, but that's my fault. I thought it was lightning hitting a pyramid not the prow of a boat. I was wondering how Spenser ended up in Egypt. For that reason alone, feel free to take this review with a grain of salt.

It's a very short book, leaving me wanting more--not always a bad thing. As an adult wanting more insight into a character I really like, it was lacking. As an introductory book to the character - other than the confusion for new readers wondering who Susan is - it whets the appetite nicely.

Let me start off as saying I am a huge Spenser Fan!!!! I am also a middle school teacher and really encourage the young adults in my classes to read anything they can (or are willing to).
The problem I have with this book is that it was advertised as written for a young adult audience, but was really written like a Spenser memoir. As a middle school teacher I feel that this book was not as good as "The Boxer and the Spy". As a Spenser nover it was a good short story, as a young adult story I feel that a teenager who did not know the history of Spenser would not get the point of why the two old people are talking about what is suposed to be a story about a 14 year old boy. It was good, but not a "young adult" story. Hopefully the future young Spenser novels will have less "Professional Spenser" and more "Young Spenser".

Spenser is dead now because his creator Robert B. Parker died on January 18, 2010, unless some imitator tries to continue the series. "Tries" is the operative word, because there is no one as good as Parker. And so it is a good time to reflect on Spenser's youth, as this volume does.

We read how Spenser was raised by his father and his mother's two brothers, three tall, strong, self assured men, all four living in the same house, after his mother died during his birth. He was an only child. His three parents raised him as a fourth man in the house, taught him how to care for himself, how to box, how to cook. We read about several of his experiences as a teen ager, all of them adventures. How he stood up to a snarling drunk black bear, how he saved a girl from her drunken father, how he killed a man, how he protected a Mexican boy, and how he stood up to twelve bullies who intended to hurt him, and more. The descriptions of how his father and two uncles treated him are a delight to read, as is the entire book.

I've been a Parker Spencer fan since 1987, always happy to see a new Spencer adventure, most which were excellent and some not very good, as Parker fulfilled his contracts for a Spencer book once a year. As the years turned to the 21st Century, and Spencer got just too old, the books seemed less plausible and too quickly written.

This one is marketed as a YA book but I can't see how a teen could pick this up and know what is really happening, the creation of boy to man, without having read many previous Spencer books, or even seen the TV series or A&E movies. This is more a book for hardcore Spencer fans to get a kick out of a young Spencer tale, the way Hollywood gives us Young Indiana Jones or young Sherlock Holmes.

In Parker usual spare, Hemingway-esque prose, he uses a badly-chosen frame: it opens with Spencer and Susan sitting on a park bench talking about his childhood experiences that made Spencer a manly, moral private eye. The chapters jump back and forth from present to pas, which is jarring and just bad storytelling. Any editor would have told the writer to take out the present stuff; but the publisher knows that Parker books will sell no matter what.

This would have been a better story if Parker had just kept to the young Spencer details, and maybe introduced Susan at the end, that it was all him telling her this.

Still, this is a good read, and a fast one -- the book is barely 25,000 words long. It contains all the heroic, moral elements of any Spencer PI yarn: coming to the gallant aid of women in distress, fighting social injustice, fighting racial inequality.

First, a very young Spencer gets bullied by some drunks so his father and brothers go kick their asses and then teach Spencer how to box (Spencer later becomes a pro boxer in the early books) and defend himself. Spencer has no mother, she died before he could remember her; he's being raised by his tough guy no nonsense dad and his mother's two brothers, his uncles, also tough guys.

At fourteen, Spencer befriends a girl, Jeannie, who has alcoholic parents -- her mother is a floozy and her dad is hunter/drinker/crazy guy who steals Jeannine over custody issues. Kidnaps her. Beats her. There's a hint of some molestation too, but like Hemingway, it's between the lines.

Spencer decides to rescue her and winds up killing the drunk father in a woods battle. Like many Spencer books, the moral justice outweighs the crime and Spencer never gets charged for murder (in other books, Spencer sometimes does kill people so the better of society).

Next, Spencer comes to the aid of a young Hispanic kid who is getting beaten up by racist kids. Jeanine tells the kid Spencer will help -- thus, Spencer is "hired" as a bodyguard problem solver as he later is as an adult.

I had fun reading this, despite the structure flaws, only because I'm a Spencer fan.

I'm saddened that Parker died not too long after this book hit the streets.

In the summer of "X-Men Origins: Wolverine", thriller novel fans get an even bigger treat: "Robert B. Parker Origins: Spenser". Because, despite that it's actually called "Chasing the Bear", that's exactly what this engrossing, adventurous, and ultimately quite moving book amounts to: no less than the tale of how Mr. Parker's intrepid detective hero Spenser- star of more than 35 novels to date- came to be.

"Chasing the Bear" is recommended for all Spenser fans, but especially for those who feel that a kind of sameness has crept into the main Spenser series over the years (not a huge criticism on my part, though I know others have communicated the feeling). That's because this Spenser tale tells a totally fresh, new type of story, but one that flows seemlessly into- and logically informs- Spenser's modern tales.

And, though some here on Amazon didn't like the following aspect of the book, I enjoyed the fact that every second or third chapter is set in the modern day, as Spenser and longtime love Susan Silverman sit in Boston's Public Garden during a lazy afternoon, mulling over the details of Spenser's youth as he relates them in the other chapters (I also liked the way Mr. Parker smoothly switches to a child's point of view in those chapters). Seeing a generous amount of the present-day Spenser and Susan helped the book feel closer to the regular series, and not a totally separate thing.

Finally, the book is surprisngly mature for an offical "young adult" title. Aside from the absense of profanity, I doubt maybe readers will notice any difference- aside from the type of plot being unfolded- from the way Mr. Parker usually tells his stories. There is no talking down or over-explaining things to the youth audience the book is primarily targeting.

Anyway, as you can probably tell, "Chasing the Bear" was a big winner for me, and I think most Spenser fans will find it to be so, too. It's also a good place to start if you've never read a Spenser adventure but have been meaning to. After reading this engaging origin tale, you can move right into the first "regular" Spenser novel, "The Godwulf Manuscript".

I was very pleased with the book. It was a clever turn to read about Spenser as a youth. He ( Parker ) could get some more mileage out of that and I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

Keep up the great work.

M.A. Kruger
Milton, VT