A book I read to my daughter in the 70s about a man (Russian?) who had a (Russian?) dancing bear. The man had 3 unique things about him: (1) he could juggle 3(?) balls, (2) he was kind, and (3) can’t remember the third.
Book is in English and short enough for a child’s attention.
A picture book, mid century American, 40s-60s possibly.
A man lives out in the woods, it’s winter. I believe there is something about pancakes. He has to go outside to do something, he takes out his winter coat which has been eaten by moths. At one point he runs into a bear, but his gun powder has gotten wet so it doesn’t work. He ends up tying the bears tail in a knot, which gets caught between trees and the bear is running so fast he jumps out of his skin. The man wears it as a coat and goes home to eat said pancakes.
This is a children’s book – little girl, house floods, parents are asleep while all their belongs float around them. She jumps across floating furniture down to the kitchen and finds a polar bear in the fridge. Messier style of illustration.
The book I’m looking for I read sometime in the late 90’s early 00’s, I got it from a local bookseller, possibly a rummage sale in Utah. It was about a teenager who was older than most in her tribe(?) and hadn’t yet gone through the rite of passage all women in the tribe go through, and so still wore the high collars of a child. Most women wore lower cut dresses to display the spiral stick-and-poke tattoos that showed they were considered women in the tribe. (I think the cover showed this?) She was scared of the rite, which involved a bear, and she’d had a failed try at it. Eventually she went to the woods to find her own bear and came back changed, she’d found something there but not a bear I think, more like a god? And something to do with her mother or lineage maybe.
In the mid 80s I would make trips to a local library in Virginia with my mother, and, according to her, my favorite books to check out were from a small green-bound book series. She remembers it as Anna's Bears or something similar. I can find nothing similar.
What the story is about is a little bear, who is always good and always on the right side of everything, receives three stars and then brags to his friends – a raccoon, a rabbit, and I don’t remember the others. But his friends get tired of the bragging and say something not very nice, so he decides to be a bad bear instead. I think he ties the raccoon’s fur in knots. But in the end, he fixes everything and learns his lesson. It was maybe a 20-page book with illustrations on every page.
The front of the book has the little bear walking through the woods. Kind of pink or peach border around the picture. The picture is just black and white, no color. The little bear looks a lot like the bear in the stories of “Little Bear” by Else Holmelund Minarik; however, they are not by the same author.
I was in Elementary School when we found it at the library one day, and it was my mother’s favorite book of all time. I still remember my mother reading it to me and how she made me laugh, and I would love to get it for her. I just can’t find this book.
I am 42 now and it was 1982-989 time frame that it was in the library. If you can find this, it would be a welcome surprise for my mother. Thank you for your time on this.
I’m looking for a children’s picture book that features a white bear – I think her name was Edwina but I am not positive. At some point in the story, she puts on a pale blue satin fancy dress and I think she goes to a ball. I owned this book but can’t find it. I would have purchased it between 1990 and 1993. My daughter (who is now 24) marks this book as one of her earliest memories. She was so enamored with this book that I sewed her a pale blue satin dress to match the one the bear wore in the book and she wore it all the time when she was two or three. I still have the dress but can’t find the book. Her birthday is in October and I’d love to find and purchase a copy of this book if I can find it. Thank you in advance for any help!