Customer Reviews

Great Crystal Bear

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I loved this. The language was poetic and relaxing. My six year year loved it, my 3 year old loved the pictures. The illustrations are beautiful.

Remember when you used to draw a polar bear eating marshmallows in an Artic snowstorm? There is certainly something compelling about polar bears, those lumbering giants covered in white fur with those coal black eyes and nose. Author Carolyn Lesser actually traveled to the Artic with experts on these majestic creatures to watch them in their wild environs. The result is a creative blend of poetic language with facts of nature as we follow the Great Crystal Bear through the change of the seasons. William Noonan provides the illustrations, where white and blue are the dominant colors. While the book is completely accurate in terms of how polar bears live their solitary existence up North--hunting, swimming, playing and traveling around its snowy kingdom--we are spared the actual sight of the bear eating the seal he is tracking (we simply see the bear closing in on his prey). I certainly like Lesser's approach, of couching science and nature in poetic phrases. I think that young students will find this more instructive than a straightforward nature lesson. I do wish there was an appendix or some sort of afterward that would already provide more scientific details about polar bears, because teachers are going to have to do some research to answer the questions their students will have about the Great Crystal Bear after reading this book.