Pearly Everlasting

August 5, 2024
A spirited teenage girl sets off through the woods of 1934 New Brunswick, Canada, to rescue the bear she considers her brother in this enchanting U.S. debut from Canadian poet Armstrong (Take Us Quietly). Pearly Everlasting Hazen has been raised since birth by her father, a cook for a lumber camp, alongside an orphaned bear cub named Bruno. Growing up, Pearly listens to her father’s tales of a mythical, devil-like creature named Old Jack, whom he believes Pearly will one day meet face-to-face. Life passes smoothly for Pearly and Bruno until she’s 15, when a new camp boss arrives and begins working the men at a breakneck pace. When the boss is found dead with his face gouged, suspicion falls on Bruno, and the boss’s nephew sells the bear to an animal trader. Terrified for Bruno’s welfare, Pearly treks through the icy Canadian wilderness to rescue him. After she reclaims Bruno from the trader, the pair meet a series of challenges as they attempt to return home. Along the way, Pearly worries they’ll meet Old Jack. The adventure brims with folklore and superstition, as Pearly musters the courage to overcome her fears, and there are many lighthearted moments, such as when Pearly convinces Bruno to climb into the backseat of a car. This gentle story is sure to win Armstrong new fans.

September 1, 2024

Award-winning Canadian author Armstrong makes her U.S. debut. At a logging camp in New Brunswick in 1934, a cook finds an orphaned bear cub and raises it alongside his newborn daughter, Pearly. When the bear is stolen years later, teenage Pearly sets off on a harrowing journey to rescue it. With a 75K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2024
Pearly is born in a New Brunswick logging camp, and it gives her an enchanted childhood. Her father is the logging camp cook, and her mother treats the loggers' wounds. Pearly's "brother," Bruno, is an orphaned bear cub who was suckled at Mrs. Everlasting's breast along with Pearly. Of course, raising a bear as a child, even far from civilization, is problematic, but all of life is problematic with logging's dangers and death skulking through the shadows. Death catches Pearly's mother, sister, and the evil camp boss, a death some would like to pin on Bruno. Others would like to use Bruno for their own dark purposes. When he is stolen, Pearly rescues him, but Bruno sustains life-threatening injuries. What Pearly does to save him strands her in a town whose citizens' ways are foreign. Armstrong's prose is shot through with Pearly's unique vernacular, and readers will feel the bone-cold winter and taste the blood of many blows that befall almost everyone. Meeting Pearly will change readers' minds about who is civilized and who is not.

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Starred review from November 1, 2024
Well-wrought touches of the fantastic enhance this tale of a girl growing up in a Canadian logging camp a century ago. About the time that Pearly Everlasting Hazen--named for a wildflower--is born in a remote logging camp in New Brunswick in 1920, her father, the camp cook, finds a tiny, orphaned bear cub in an ice-rimmed burrow. He brings the creature home, and his wife nurses her infant daughter and the cub together. As far as Pearly Everlasting and her family are concerned, Bruno is her brother, even as he grows big enough to unsettle strangers. The logging camps where the Hazens live are harsh places; if the work doesn't kill someone, the weather might. Pearly Everlasting's mother, Eula, is a healer who tends workers' broken bones and other wounds, while her husband, Edon, keeps everyone fed. Pearly Everlasting and Bruno--and human older sister Ivy--grow up in this nurturing nest, attuned to the natural world and pretty much blissfully unaware of what's beyond. Their only outside contact is a woman they call Song-catcher, an ethnologist who, with her companion, Ebony, travels around with cumbersome recording equipment to document folk music and tales by people like Eula. The eventual snake in this childhood paradise is a new camp boss, a bully named Swicker, who arrives with a couple of minions and soon has Bruno in his sights. An attempt to bear-nap Bruno and sell him to an animal trader is foiled with the help of Song-catcher and Ebony, but later girl and bear, teenagers by now, stumble upon a murdered body, and Bruno is blamed and confiscated. Pearly Everlasting's harrowing quest to get him back, on foot through the winter woods and then in a town that's a complete mystery to her, is paralleled by the search for the pair by a young man named Ansell, a worker at the camp whose face is strangely webbed with silver scars, the result of a lightning strike. Armstrong, who has published five books of poetry and two previous novels, tells their tale in lyrically striking prose and makes its fairy tale elements work by grounding them in the grim realities and stunning beauties of life in a Depression-era logging camp. A campfire story about a girl whose brother is a bear becomes a warmly enchanting novel.

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