This book is a treatise on everything you should not do while hiking. They walk through snow in summer clothes. They cross rivers with potentially dangerous undercurrents. They've come equipped with absolutely nothing but ignorance and stupidity.
Our characters traipse across the four seasons and every environmental variation at every altitude possible, meet a bear, and then react in the most inappropriate manner possible. Then of course there's the suspension of disbelief. It stunk, and you can't bleach the images away once they've been burned into your memory.Īww. Only two things could be said of it with absolution. Much like the drawings in this book, I couldn't distinguish between the characters in my own imagery either. The artwork is impressionistic, evocative of my youth, particularly the memories I have of using the excrement in my diapers to paint on my bedroom walls. Yeah, they're going on a bear hunt, just like this zebra is going on a "lion hunt"
There are only two options that come to mind when I try to discern author intention here: this book is either a treatise for parents "tactfully" trying to get rid of their kids, or the first in a failed series of books, the overarching theme of which is "let's do stupid shit!" They take them to a bear's cave as he is, presumably, in the midst of hibernation, when bears are at their most pissed off and hungry. The parents lead their children gently by the hand right to the threshold of death's door. Finally, rarely, if ever, are the parents depicted as condoning the child's self-destruction. The mistakes characters make should teach children about human folly and the lessons we can glean from the err of our ways. They make sense to me because they follow three core principles: it's ok to depict kids doing dumb shit, because their mistakes are generally inadvertent.
I don't have a big problem with those books. Franklin the Turtle is always doing stupid shit and then whining about it when he gets caught. In The Cat in the Hat, the children are seduced into destroying their entire house, which they know full well will result in mother's unbridled scorn. There are plenty of children's books about self destructive impulses. A Scathing Review of We're Going on a Bear Hunt, aka "The Children's Guide to Passive Suicide"īefore we go any further, a little context:
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