In a world where you can be anything, be a bear.
Year of the Bearâs short stories weave together social commentary with folklore, fairy tale, fantasy, and science fiction to entertain, challenge, and sometimes frighten readers.
A lawyer navigates a most unusual Tinder date; a gangster flees a deal gone bad; a young child is gifted with a magical hat; a group of campers meet a secretive stranger; a hitchhiker accepts a lift from a man and his ursine passenger.
Year of the Bear is both engrossing and engaging, with the collectionâs contemporary characters plunging readers into vivid atmospheric situations.
Narratives of acceptance, diversity, and inclusion underscore the Year of the Bearâs unusual and inventive short stories, establishing Jay Chesters as one of Australia's most fascinating emerging authors.
In a world where you can be anything, be a bear.
Year of the Bearâs short stories weave together social commentary with folklore, fairy tale, fantasy, and science fiction to entertain, challenge, and sometimes frighten readers.
A lawyer navigates a most unusual Tinder date; a gangster flees a deal gone bad; a young child is gifted with a magical hat; a group of campers meet a secretive stranger; a hitchhiker accepts a lift from a man and his ursine passenger.
Year of the Bear is both engrossing and engaging, with the collectionâs contemporary characters plunging readers into vivid atmospheric situations.
Narratives of acceptance, diversity, and inclusion underscore the Year of the Bearâs unusual and inventive short stories, establishing Jay Chesters as one of Australia's most fascinating emerging authors.
It was the year of the bear. After the bushfires came back-to-back once-in-a-thousand-year storms and floods, then the global pandemic, and then sometimes all of it at once.
Then, after the pandemic, the bears.Â
They numbered in their thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. There seemed to be more every time you looked.Â
Impossible to distinguish one from another, the bears pressed together and moved with a single purpose and a single mind.
They clogged the roads and the streets. Nobody had ever seen so many bears. Nobody had guessed that so many bears even still survived in the country. Yet they were undeniable; a growing, teaming mass of bearâblack bears, grizzly bears, brown bears, and everything in betweenâall lumbering along, oblivious to everything else.
Occasionally a fight would break out, and two enormous beasts would rise up on their back legs with a deafening roar. Even people who had begun to creep outside their homes to watch would take a step back, afraid that some spell would be broken and the bears would notice them, turn on them. But they never did. And the fights rarely came to any actual violence; there might be a swipe of a giant paw, or an enormous set of teeth would graze an opponent, but it would be forgotten almost as soon as it began.
We couldnât tell if they were running from something or towards it. The truth is, the bears didnât seem to be in any great hurry to be anywhere, but their numbers grew every day, with every town they passed through, always more bears.
It was almost an unspoken agreement that we wouldnât touch them, interfere with them, hurt them. We didnât know when it started, but it showed no signs of stopping.
Bears who become men, men who become bears, shadows who might be bears, stolen bears and bear-thiefs, talking and dreaming bears, bear caves and charcoal sketches of them, storytelling hats that sometimes speak about bears but also so much more, a secret moon base with intelligent bears - and I'm just getting started.
Year of the Bear is a comfortably short collection of stories with one thing in common - Whether the star of the show or a forgotten thought in the deepest night, bears can be found in all of these stories. A curious concept for such a collection that intrigues and and welcomes you into its arms with a full range of emotion and lots of characters and stories.
While technically about bears, this book also features a lot of topics that hit close to home to every reader: pandemics and plagues - sometimes merely a side note, but other times at the center of a short story. The reader is embraced by the familiarity and nostalgia, and with charming humor Chester uses these feelings to craft his little words and shows us how, despite different circumstances, everything will be okay. A good number of stories in the collection are very short and leave you lots of space to think about it, whereas others span a dozen or more pages. Many were truly brilliantly crafted and show Chester's attention to detail and plot. My personal favorite here was 'The Storytelling Hat', which - while not necessarily about bears in any real way - was truly nostalgic and enchanted.
An area that did not feel as strong with this read were the connections between the stories. A collection of short stories does not necessarily need this, but considering how the stories combine to portray the same world (sometimes, but other times an entirely different Earth devoid of humans), more references between the stories would have given the collection a more coherent feel that lacked a tad. Furthermore, the characters seldom had a lot of personality and often felt very similar (and mostly male). The queer representation of this book was pretty good though - lots of bi and gay characters dispersed between the pages, even though nearly no story was about romance per sé.
All in all, a truly absurd and lovely read one can breeze through on a single evening and think about for weeks.