The Bear
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Cover Story
This issue's cover artwork for Philip Pullman's Northern Lights is by Stuart Williams. Pullman talks to BfK's interviewer Geoff Fox. Thanks to Scholastic Childen's Books for their help in producing this January cover.
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Closely related in artistic style to Briggs' best-selling The Snowman, The Bear mixes double page spreads with cartoon strips using narrative and speech bubbles. Tilly wakes up to find a polar bear in her room, bending over her bed. Mother and father are models of parenting (unlike Billy's mum in There's No Such Thing as a Dragon) and they go along with what they plainly see as Tilly's fantasy. For children the book is magical. As adult readers, we are left with perhaps more than the usual question such books pose - is the bear real or not? Regardless of the answer, this is a very beautiful, warmly amusing book, ideal for reading one-to-one with any child.