The heroine pees in the freshly fallen snow, the bear and the heroine take dumps together in the morning, the bear farts when he walks away. First of all, we're told how ugly the bear is for most of the beginning of the book, and there's lengthy descriptions of pooping, peeing and farting. Speaking of bear smut, it takes forEVER to get to the 'mane event' (pun intended). But on the other hand, you just wrote a book about bear smut, so was there any cognitive dissonance at all when penning this treatise criticizing other peoples' taste? Like, did I really need to know about how the author- oops, I mean the main character- ranks certain classic works of fiction, or that she considers morels superior to truffles? I mean, we've all got to soapbox and this book was published before blogs, so I get it. It's like the pretentious meanderings of a hipster with some smut thrown in. I don't even know how to describe this book. The rules of the challenge clearly state 'please pick something under $5' but my friends and followers are evil people and they kept telling me to read 'the bear book,' AKA 'Canada's Secret Shame.' So I ended up spending $10 on this dumb book, and it wasn't even the version from the 70s that looks like a bodice-ripper.

I have a weekly challenge called 'What the Actual F*** Wednesday' where I let my readers pick something that's really weird for me to read and review. BEAR falls into a genre of fiction called 'scatlit,' which is my name for authors who clearly would rather be writing erotica but decided to write literary fiction for the $$$, and instead of being lambasted for being gross or smutty, they are instead praised for being 'brave' and 'daring,' and win awards and even get their books blurbed by Margaret Atwood.

Bear marian engel review