Ariana Isabel Trelles-Duckett
Contributing Writer & Copy Editor
Familial bonds can get rocked over and over like ferries on choppy water. Those held together by shared trauma can only take so much damage, until they hit a breaking point.
“Bear” by Julia Phillips (2024) follows a pair of close-knit sisters struggling to keep their mediocre lives afloat. Elena, older and self-assured, works at a golf course, and Sam, younger and whose perspective the novel follows, works at a concession stand on a ferry that travels from Washington State to San Juan Island, where the sisters and their dying mother live. Sam and Elena live in an unending loop of serving spoiled tourists and taking care of their mother, whose illness has prolonged well after they anticipated she would pass, keeping them in grief-fueled suspense for years.
At the end of Sam’s shift on the ferry one day, she and several tourists spot a massive bear swimming in the water below. It’s based on an actual sighting in 2019 on San Juan Island, five years before Phillips published her novel. Sam is amused by it, and it gives her hope — “Sam did feel lucky, sometimes. She did see some beautiful things.” The bear continues to stay on the island, and makes appearances at Sam and Elena’s house. It shears off the siding of their front door, wanders around their porch, and lingers on the path Elena takes to walk to work.
The descriptions of the bear have a supernatural tone, but the animal’s lack of action or purpose makes you wonder what the intrigue is besides its recurring presence. As it keeps coming back, the sisters’ relationship with the bear transforms — Elena becomes fascinated by it while Sam fears it more and more, convinced it will hurt them. Once Sam starts getting more unsettled by the bear’s visits, she reaches out to a bear specialist, who emphasizes the strangeness of the situation but doesn’t help the way Sam wants her to. Life goes on, as uneasy as on the first page, and even becomes a bit boring as the sisters argue and refuse to understand each other’s perspectives for chapters on end.
“Bear” makes a subtle transition to fantasy as the nature of the bear becomes more confusing — the bear switches its interest in both sisters to only Elena, who reciprocates by increasingly defending its harmlessness and relishing its beauty. As Sam schemes how to save her sister, whom she comes to view as reckless and wrong, she recalls moments in her childhood which impacted her thinking as an adult. As children, Elena would come up with stories about a magical world for them. Sam starts to grasp how she had always relied on her sister’s confidence and imagination to construct a better life for them. When they were teenagers, Elena promised Sam that they would get off the island and live exciting, happy lives together in the future. Sam holds onto this once-mentioned dream for years, and she does everything she can to keep them on track to their own fairy tale ending.
Though Sam’s backstory is presented as obviously as an instruction manual, her guilt backed by her confusion and fear makes it read like a confession readers have waited for hundreds of pages to grab onto. It’s rewarding to find out, if delayed in its arrival, like a great dessert after a pretty good dinner.
Hardship mutates the sisters’ relationship, but fantasization dooms them. Maybe Sam has a limited imagination, destroying everything which gets in the way of the perfect fairy tale she and her sister are supposed to live in once they escape San Juan Island. Maybe Elena felt happiest when spending time with the bear. The sisters think they know a lot about each other and what the other wants, but it becomes clear that they barely know each other at all, having constructed each other into the roles they want them to play. Ultimately, Phillips suggests that hope can bring light to dark times, or become the darkness itself.
“Bear” by Julia Phillips. Hogarth Press. 304 pp. $28.