The Books

The Egyptian Polar Bear

by Joann Adinolfi

One Potato Review

Imagines the story behind the story – recorded in hieroglyphics – of an architect’s plans to build a burial vault for a polar bear in ancient Egypt. How the heck did a polar bear get to Egypt? On a wandering iceberg, of course. There’s a nice little fable here too about the burgeoning friendship between the bear and the boy-Pharoah, a brief stopover in homesickness, a sphinx, a griffin, but the wonder is the quality of the illustrations in this book, which are frequently true to the Walk-like-an-Egyptian dimensionality of art from that period, yet also so vivid and saturated you may wonder if the rest of your life is not spent behind sunglasses. Striking to stumble upon, wherever the shelf.