Ahem.

POV: you’re a bear, and your best friend is a mouse, and you ride a motorcycle. Corey Tabor (creator of the Fox early reader series and Cranky, Crabby Crow: Saves the World (2025)) takes readers on a delightful meta romp as a boy explores a day in the life of a bear. We open from the perspective of the bear, watching its eyes crack open and let in the sun. It’s unclear at first who is narrating this experience, as we only see the life of the bear, and the simple black text on white background below. But soon enough there’s a second voice – a green speech bubble interrupts our narrator’s text at the bottom of the page. Slowly a second narrative emerges, as more unseen voices chime in with questions, incredulity, and some suggestions, portrayed with different colors and speech bubbles below the images. Just as Bear and its best friend Mouse are reunited, the perspective shifts. Suddenly we’re in a classroom, and we can see who has been voicing the narrative this whole time: a boy (who suspiciously shares the name of our author) and his classmates, whose speech bubbles jump into the illustrations and are paired with individuals for the first time. Corey’s teacher also chimes in, indicating that his wild motorcycle and hot air balloon story may or may not have fulfilled the assignment for “animal presentations.”

This unconventional narrative structure may be convoluted to describe, but comes across elegantly and easily with Tabor’s careful pairing of text, color, and images. Friendly multi-media illustrations made using crayons, pencil, watercolors, and other styles ground our perspective in the bear’s, and allow for fun comparisons between the bear’s life and that of our narrator. Humor is infused throughout, from the opening “ahem” to the audience’s interjections, to a final gag in the endpapers. This is a fun way to subvert story time expectations and keep elementary age readers guessing.

Reviewed by Carolyn Gallmeyer, Lithgow Public Library, Augusta