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Pearly Everlasting
In a narrative sown with rural folklore and superstition, Pearly Everlasting is an enchanting woodland Gothic about the triumph of good over evil and the forgotten beauty of the natural world.
New Brunswick, 1934. When a cook in a logging camp finds an orphaned baby bear, he brings it home to his wife, who names the cub Bruno and raises him alongside her newborn daughter, Pearly Everlasting.
During the Great Depression, amidst severe poverty and dangerous work conditions, Pearly’s family and the woodsmen form a close-knit community that embraces the tame, young bear in their camp.
But when a new camp supervisor—who increasingly endangers the lives of the loggers for profit—arrives, he is less accepting of Bruno. When the supervisor is found dead, Bruno is blamed, and soon after is kidnapped and sold to an animal trader. Pearly, now a teenager, has no choice but to find Bruno and sets off on a hazardous solo journey through the forest—her first trip to “the Outside” —to rescue him.
To make her way home again, Pearly will have to tramp more than fifty miles through ice and snow, elude the malevolent spirit of Jack in the Dark and confront the modern-day cruelty of villagers fearful of her family’s way of life. Over those harrowing miles, Pearly will discover what it really means to be family to a bear.
New Brunswick, 1934. When a cook in a logging camp finds an orphaned baby bear, he brings it home to his wife, who names the cub Bruno and raises him alongside her newborn daughter, Pearly Everlasting.
During the Great Depression, amidst severe poverty and dangerous work conditions, Pearly’s family and the woodsmen form a close-knit community that embraces the tame, young bear in their camp.
But when a new camp supervisor—who increasingly endangers the lives of the loggers for profit—arrives, he is less accepting of Bruno. When the supervisor is found dead, Bruno is blamed, and soon after is kidnapped and sold to an animal trader. Pearly, now a teenager, has no choice but to find Bruno and sets off on a hazardous solo journey through the forest—her first trip to “the Outside” —to rescue him.
To make her way home again, Pearly will have to tramp more than fifty miles through ice and snow, elude the malevolent spirit of Jack in the Dark and confront the modern-day cruelty of villagers fearful of her family’s way of life. Over those harrowing miles, Pearly will discover what it really means to be family to a bear.
352 pages, Paperback
First published June 25, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 29, 2024
Wow! I couldn’t put the book down! I felt like I lived the journey alongside Pearly and Bruno. An instant favourite!
June 18, 2024
4.2 Unique and memorable Canadian tale of a girl raised in the forest with a bear for a sibling.
*Edited to add: I just realized this book hasn't even been published yet! I was reading an uncorrected proof.
*Edited to add: I just realized this book hasn't even been published yet! I was reading an uncorrected proof.
July 9, 2024
This lovely tale of a girl and her bear-cub brother is a delight. Though not without its share of sorrow, “Pearly Everlasting” remains light and true at heart. A cross between Dickens and Twain in the New Brunswick logging camps of the Great Depression, Tammy Armstrong has written a wonderful tall tale to go alongside Huckleberry and Pip, Tom and Oliver. Her prose is beautiful, even though it slips from time to time feeling the need to move the story along rather than basking in its vibrancy, and the adventures are, indeed, thrilling.
July 4, 2024
I read the advanced readers edition. The adventure, the love, the heartbreak and grief are all illustrated with beautifully sculpted language that sings with the local cadence of the Canadian backwoods folklore that permeates the story. Highly reminiscent of Jack London's Call of the Wild, with the same kind of gritty survival.
July 10, 2024
It started slow for me, but then I could not put this down. Loved it.
Beautiful language (she's a poet), fantastical characters. At once bewitching, than cruel.
Beautiful language (she's a poet), fantastical characters. At once bewitching, than cruel.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews