Squee
Genre: Graphic Novel, Romance
My Boyfriend is a Bear is a graphic novel about a woman whose boyfriend is a bear. Not a shifter, but rather an actual, non-metaphorical bear.
They meet when the narrator, Nora, goes on a camping trip with a soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend who berates her for bringing fashion magazines with her (he thinks she should read “London or Kerouac”). Nora marches off to the woods and buries her magazines. She goes home to LA, dumps the boyfriend, and has a fun night drinking with friends. When she gets home from the night of drinking, she finds Bear, who saw her burying the magazines and who thoughtfully dug them back up and followed her home to return them. Being drunk means Nora is pretty chill about finding a 500 pound American Black Bear on her porch and from that moment on they are an item.
The comic does not address how or if Nora and Bear have sex, but it does quickly establish that Bear is an excellent cuddler. Bear and Nora’s cat, Nutso, have some adjustment issues, but they become friends and Bear constructs a really cool series of shelves that give Nutso a way to move all around the house without getting stepped on. Before long, Nora and Bear make their relationship public, winning over one of Nora’s two best friends and discovering that the outdoor mall is a good hang out spot since “everyone is looking at their phones anyway.”
However, even as Bear gets a job and charms Nora’s dad with his handy repair skills, the spectre of hibernation hangs over Bear and Nora. Most of their relationship is about compromise, but Bear has to hibernate. This becomes a challenge of trust, acceptance, and living a balanced life. If the earlier part of the book is the honeymoon stage of a relationship when even the other person’s flaws are adorable, the issue of hibernation is where shit gets real, and in order to deal with it, Nora has to examine her own life.
I can’t help but give this a Squee grade. Since I spent all of the book driving my family crazy by forcing them to look at pictures (“OMG look Bear and Nutso are friends! OMG look Bear hates couscous!”) any other grade would seem disingenuous. However, this book won’t be for everyone. There are a lot of unanswered questions about Bear. You have to be able to roll with the metaphor. It could have used more diversity among the characters and one of the main characters is so awful I wanted to scream every time she showed up.
I recommend this book for fans of contemporary romance and for people who like shifter books but ask themselves, “What about hibernation, though?” I feel I should warn people that Nutso is much pampered and loved but also an old kitty and many tissues were sacrificed to this reading experience. I’d also recommend it to people who thought Shape of Water was a potentially sweet movie but didn’t like the actual plot and just wanted to watch a woman and a fish man eat hard boiled eggs all day. This is a sweet, funny comic that has a whimsical story to tell about a bear who likes coffee but that also has an underlying story to tell about universal relationship problems.
This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well.
Thanks!
I adored this book, and this is the best review of it I’ve read. It really captured its charms.
I was more enchanted by the art than the text, tho I loved both.
I don’t know about bear boyfriends…makes me think of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_(novel)
It was way disturbing.
This does sound like fun. And, happy day, my library owns a copy. Thanks for your post, Carrie.
I’m totally familiar with this book! It is indeed the cutest.
I don’t do graphic novels (not enough words), but I think I need this.
@Michelle
I had the exact same thought , but this sounds WAY less disturbing though.
My now 4 year old son saw it in my pile of library books at the time and since it was a graphic novel wanted to “read” it with me. I edited a portion of the words as I was reading to him and glossed over a few pages, we both enjoyed it a lot 🙂 so I was glad to see it was a Squee review.
This has been in my wish list forEVER. So glad to see this squee.
Definitely have to try this – it looks really interesting.
A were-bear romance where the hibernation issue is central to the plot is Husband fur Hire by T.S. Joyce (first, and my favorite, of the Bears Fur Hire series).
Bear and Nora’s cat, Nutso, have some adjustment issues, but they become friends
Now I’m trying to remember where I saw the video of a cat and a bear in a national park who are good friends.
Psst, Boss Bitch, the second image somehow picked up <a href> tags–was it supposed to be an alt or title?–which sadly lead only to a 404. (I was hoping it would be an enlargement so I could read the text.)
@10 Louise, if you hit control + and increase the font of the whole page 3-4 times, the text becomes quite readable.
I just finished this. It was super cute but it was so weird! I think I really liked it but I’m also not sure…
I really want to share it with my friends so I ended up ordering 2 more copies of this in paperback. I’m shipping one directly to my sister and keeping the other to loan out. Three copies of one book so that totally blew my book budget! I guess that means I loved it?
“The comic does not address how or if Nora and Bear have sex”
You’re right in that the comic never shows sex or addresses how it works between Nora and Bear, but it does establish that their relationship is sexual with a small, throwaway gag of Bear making a sexual reference during a game of Scrabble which leads to him carrying off Nora and her noting in the text that “mating season was a lot of fun”
So uh… Yeah. This is a really cute graphic novel that I got to read with my GF, but the idea of them having sex as human and straight up regular bear was honestly strange and a little off putting. Bear cuddling is cute, straight up intercourse with an animal is weird.