The Very Super Bear

The Very Super Bear, originally published in hardcover in 2020, has been republished in its entirety as a board book.

One day when a honey-hunting bear is wandering through the jungle, he spots a large piece of orange cloth on the ground. Picking it up, he wraps it around himself like a cape, an action which leads to Bear’s being repeatedly mistaken for a superhero, one who can fly. The first call upon his presumed superpowers comes from an elephant that is stuck at the top of a very tall, spindly palm-like tree. To desperate Elephant’s entreaty: “Please fly up here and save me./I can’t get down....”, Bear responds, “It’s not that kind of cape”...“I’ll have to climb instead.” However, the combined weight of the elephant and the climbing bear causes the tree to bend to such an extent that, when Elephant steps off the tree to safety, the tree abruptly springs back and, acting like a catapult, flings Bear into the air with his cape streaming behind him.

The now airborne bear encounters a flock of geese with Bruce the Goose addressing him as Super Bear and calling for his aid in stopping “[a] great big yellow monster [that] is eating all the trees”, including the one in which Owl is asleep. Again Bear attempts to explain his limitations to the geese, this time just before his splashdown. Concluding that the monster might be cranky, Bear decides to pick a big bouquet of flowers to cheer up the monster because “everyone loves flowers!”, and Bear fills up his cape before slinging the flowers in the monster’s direction. While the floral gift does not stop the great big yellow monster, the bees that follow the flower do, and the monster rolls away. To celebrate Bear’s triumph, Owl, using Bear’s cape which, it appears, was actually Owl’s “picnic rug”, hosts a moonlight picnic “since Owl preferred the night”.

Bland’s text only uses the words “great big yellow monster” to identify the thing that is “eating all the trees”, but his illustrations reveal it to be a Caterpillar-like machine. While the book has a happy ending for its young listeners/readers, adults will recognize the irony in the line, “The Very Super Bear and Bruce had saved the jungle’s day.” Tomorrow, the machine and its now bee-protected, but unseen, human operator will be back to continue the jungle’s deforestation.

Bland tells Bear’s tale via a smoothly reading poetic text that uses an ABCB rhyme scheme. The closing detail that Bear’s cape was actually Owl’s possession seemed unnecessary. Bland’s illustrations are full of colour and action. Particularly effective is the spread containing four panels that show the tree bearing Elephant increasingly bending as Bear ascends.

Scholastic Canada recommended the originally hardcover version of The Very Super Bear for an audience of 3 to7-year-olds and suggests that the board book would be appropriate for even a younger group, birth to age 3. Because The Very Super Bear is a plot driven book, as opposed to a concept book as many board books are, I would suggest that the initial Scholastic recommendation of ages 3-7 still applies, but now its board book format limits it to the preschool crowd.