⭐️Good Bear, Bad Bear [STARRED REVIEW]
Hyewon Yum. Holiday House/Porter, $18.99 (40p) ISBN 978-0-8234-6054-0
Positioning a stuffed bear as the screen for a young child’s projections, this emotionally astute picture book from Yum (A Spoonful of the Sea) reframes the labels kids sometimes pin on themselves. As the book opens, its narrator, the smaller of two pale-skinned, dark-haired siblings, explains, “My sister can read./ I can’t. And I never will.” Moreover, they report, the bigger child has tidier habits, tights without holes, and “never loses anything.” With a child’s ironclad logic, the protagonist determines that their sister is “the good girl”—and internalizes being “the bad one.” When the two receive identical stuffies, and the narrator’s sister dubs her own Good Bear, “I know exactly what to name mine.” And indeed, “Good Bear sips the tea. Bad Bear gobbles up cookies” and even ends up wearing a scowl. Rendered with colored pencil, crayon, and watercolor, the empathetic and observant artwork deals in round-cheeked figures and buttery yellows, letting self-recrimination sting without tipping visually into gloom. When Bad Bear emerges from the washing machine without one eye, it takes the bigger sister’s love to gently dismantle her sibling’s premise about the bears and the children, too. Good Bear may be calm and kind, but Bad Bear is “funny, brave, and interesting,” she argues—and who wants to be “only Good or Bad your entire life,” anyway? Moving from certitude into subtlety, it’s a wise celebration of the multifaceted self. Ages 4–8. (Nov.)
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