Dark and humorous, literary but with the heart of a detective novel, Ordinary Bear weighs the burden of grief while exploring our boundless capacity for humanity, kindness, and hope.
Farley stands out among his Iñupiat neighbors in the Alaska village he calls home, both white and enormous, like the hungry polar bears that wander its streets. Jovial and a little hapless, he works as an investigator for a North Slope oil company, passing the long Arctic winters drinking whiskey with the village’s preacher and playing in the weekly poker game hosted by its matriarch and mayor.
When his young daughter visits from thousands of miles away in Portland—where she lives with her mother, who despises him—a shocking moment of violence leaves her dead and Farley injured. Crippled by his wounds and hamstrung with guilt over his inability to save her, he goes home to Oregon to try to make amends.
There he strikes up an unlikely friendship with a single mother and her daughter. With their help, he begins the slow process of healing—until the girl goes missing. Faced with the opportunity to do what he couldn’t do for his own daughter, Farley sets out on a brutal odyssey through Portland’s quirky and dangerous underworld, using his wits and his fists to try to save her life along with the shattered remains of his own.
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“Ordinary Bear is a masterful tapestry of resilience and atonement, skillfully intertwining its characters’ lives. It plunges the reader into the tumultuous sea of grief, its destructive force as surprising in its course as it is poignant in its impact. This book is as immediate, painful, and tender as a fresh wound. It hurt to put it down. Also great is the sharp and precise prose that makes up every paragraph of this book. It’s written with a blend of wit, vulnerability, and danger that makes the experience of reading it as exhilarating as it is profound. Bernard possesses a remarkable flair for writing characters with whom we’d travel to hell and back, which is great because that’s exactly where he sends them. If any of Richard Russo’s characters had cracked ribs and chipped teeth, they’d be C. B. Bernard’s characters.”
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Adam J. Shafer, author of Never Walk Back