Non-fiction disguised as fiction.
Plot: Nanu is a polar bear fresh from a miscarriage because she hadn’t packed on enough weight last summer to carry her pregnancy to term. We follow her from feeding herself, mating, hibernation, pregnancy, and taking care of her cubs, all while the ice gets thinner, the food less plentiful, and the growing danger from humans.
Raffan started his career in the hard sciences and bailed real quick after he saw the kind of things you had to do to science “right”. Instead, he turned his focus to living in the North, learning from the numerous Indigenous nations that have lived alongside polar bears since time immemorial, and using education and writing to promote better stewardship. Spoiler alert, it hasn’t worked and polar bears are super endangered.
This book is a different approach I think can be best described as what would happen if David Attenborough wrote a book. The writing is beautiful and immediate. While Raffan does explain certain things to the reader, much of the time you are as helpless as Nanu, navigating the world with instincts honed over millennia, not designed for the changes that have happened over the last century. If Nanu is facing a fire, she wouldn’t know where it comes from, and neither do we. This has a really interesting impact when we do know more. I was so settled into her skin that by the time she was being captured by scientists – just to get tagged and released, which is essential in developing useful data on the health of their population – I was still so mad that they were scaring her like that! As if she doesn’t have enough on her plate!
This level of immersion is pretty impressive for a 3 hour audiobook. This book is beautifully written, rigorously researched, and a very quick read.
Just don’t forget to read the author’s note. It has some crucial context about elements in this book that you don’t want to miss out on.