Bear story A novel

Myth and reality fuse together in the Alsakan wilderness in the potent latest from Ivey (The Snow Child). Single mom Birdie, 26, occasionally drinks too much. When sober, she devotes herself to caring for her six-year-old daughter, Emaleen, a precocious girl who believes in witches. After Birdie falls for a mysterious and badly scarred man named Arthur, she and Emaleen move with him to his remote cabin. At first, life is bucolic, full of mushroom hunting and berry picking on the mountains, and Birdie is excited by Arthur's primitive lifestyle. But when Emaleen catches him walking the woods in a bear skin, things take a dangerous turn for mother and child. Ivey shifts perspectives between Birdie, who longs to remake her life, and Emaleen, whose attempts to make sense of what she sees animate a story rich in legends about local animals and shape-shifters. The novel is alive with a sense of the natural world of Alaska, which Ivey portrays as a liminal space where the human and animal kingdoms interact, and it's buoyed by gripping suspense and moments of tenderness. Ivey's fans will be well pleased. Agent: Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management. (Feb.)

A young Alaskan woman's lover bears a deep secret. Ivey's third novel largely concerns Birdie, whose life is badly disordered. She tends bar at a remote lodge in Alaska and is prone to alcohol- and coke-fueled parties with the locals, which leaves her neglectful toward her 6-year-old daughter, Emaleen. She's attracted to one man, Arthur, who's kind but a little peculiar: He seems to always speak in the present tense, disappears into the woods for long stretches, and thinks a hunk of tundra is a fine gift. In time, through Arthur's concerned father, Warren, Birdie learns a little more about what's made Arthur so distant, even feral. Part dark romance, part outdoorsy adventure tale, this story has traces of the mysticism, folklore, and fairy tales that informed Ivey's two previous novels, and at its strongest it immerses the reader deeply in Arthur's peculiar, bear-like perspective on the world. (When he proclaims to Birdie that "I am loving you," she muses: "As if love, once it came into existence, radiated backward and forward, encompassing all of time.") But some of the novel's parts mesh imperfectly: The nature of Birdie and Arthur's attraction isn't well-sold, Emaleen is cloyingly precocious, and Warren's role in the story feels unfinished. A closing section that moves the action years into the future stresses some of the lessons that the Birdie-Arthur romance is meant to exemplify: That love is healing as well as risky, attraction is often inexplicable, and we're more resilient than we often think. Credit Ivey for freshening up those themes--like Margaret Atwood, she's gifted at writing about nature in off-kilter but not surrealistic ways--but the book's overall structure is a bit creaky. A respectable if imperfect attempt to explore the line between human and animal nature. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.