THE BEAR FAMILY’S WORLD TOUR CHRISTMAS

Kasparavicius (The Little Match Girl, not reviewed, etc.) introduces a large family of bears who decide to take a world tour to celebrate Christmas. They attach their entire house to a huge hot-air balloon, and with the musical accompaniment of a band of angel bears, they float off to visit polar bears in the far north, spectacled bears in Peru, koalas in Australia, sun bears in Sri Lanka, pandas in China, and a concluding holiday visit to their relatives, Mr. and Mrs. Teddy and their children. Together the extended family celebrates with a visit from Santa Bear, who arrives with his pack full of live teddy bears for gifts. The visits to the various countries impart some cultural information into the illustrations, such as bamboo used for construction of the panda houses and a weaving loom used by the bears in Peru, but the world tour is mainly part of an imaginative story and a vehicle for the detailed paintings by Kasparavicius, and not a significant source for learning about other cultures. One might point out that both koalas are not really bears and pandas are questionable in that classification, but then those cute characters might have had to be left out of the story. All the bears have perfect posture, and in fact the illustrator’s style has a strong vertical orientation, with an old-fashioned, folk-art feeling and a posed quality to the bears as though they were all standing very still for the artist to get them just right. (Picture book. 3-6)