Reviews

Ken­nebec Journal reviewer Bill Bush­nell wrote:

It is not often that a fic­tion writer can cap­ture the com­plete, vivid fla­vor of a full story in less than 100 pages, but Betsy Con­nor Bowen has done it with her debut book, SPRING BEAR. Bowen is a jour­nal­ist and film­maker who lives in cen­tral Maine. Although she has pub­lished numer­ous arti­cles and made sev­eral short films, this is her first novel, a grip­ping Maine tale of “rich land, poor peo­ple, hard liv­ing.” This slen­der, self-published novella is a mas­ter­piece of con­cise writ­ing where every phrase and sen­tence is impor­tant. No words are wasted, yet she does not sac­ri­fice the story’s plot, atmos­phere, sus­pense or emo­tion for brevity. This is a grim story of a fam­ily falling apart under the weight of poverty, hard times, bad luck and worse deci­sions, and a young teenage girl’s des­per­ate effort to make things right. Evvie Mal­low is a four­teen year old girl, born and raised in the Maine woods. Her father was badly injured in an acci­dent and is basi­cally alive but unaware of any­thing. Her long-suffering mother is stoic, try­ing to make ends meet, fear­ful of being alone. Evvie is smart and feisty, and she hates Lester Dar­row, rough woods­man who traps and kills bears ille­gally and who is mak­ing the moves on her mother while her father sits in the liv­ing room, silent and unblink­ing. Evvie is des­per­ate to escape this unhealthy home, but gets preg­nant, mak­ing her options fewer and her des­per­a­tion greater. Evvie’s two life-determining deci­sions focus on the baby and Lester, and her actions are stun­ning and final — set­ting her up for a life­time of guilt — but know­ing she did the right thing in both cases. And only a kindly, per­cep­tive game war­den knows the truth. This is a fab­u­lous story well told.

Bill Bush­nell lives and writes in Harp­swell, Maine.

© Bill Bush­nell, Ken­nebec Jour­nal ON BOOKS Sun­day, Novem­ber 15, 2009

Kirkus Dis­cov­eries wrote:

Sur­vival of the fittest in a remote Maine village.

In her first novella, doc­u­men­tary film­maker Bowen sym­pa­thet­i­cally depicts the hard­scrab­ble life of 14-year-old Evvie Mal­low, one of the oth­er­wise for­got­ten res­i­dents of tiny Soper’s Mills, Maine. The lives of the entire Mal­low fam­ily change dra­mat­i­cally the day high winds fell a giant oak, crush­ing the cab of Henry Mallow’s truck and part of his skull. No longer capa­ble of speech or per­form­ing the sim­plest of tasks, Evvie’s father, Henry, nonethe­less remains his family’s pri­mary bread­win­ner as Evvie and her mother, Bessie, now sur­vive mainly on his insur­ance money.

Henry’s unlikely tragedy draws the atten­tion of Lester Dar­row, an unsa­vory bear-poaching local, who oppor­tunis­ti­cally comes to roost with Bessie, much to Evvie’s dis­ap­proval. In Evvie’s view, Dar­row exacts on her and her mother the same degree of heart­less cun­ning he employs while trap­ping a mother bear whose young cubs hud­dle round her dying body for warmth. When Evvie learns she is preg­nant a cou­ple months after her very first sum­mer romance has ended–and the father, whose last name she never learned, has left the state–she decides the best way for her unborn child to escape this unre­lent­ing cir­cle of hard­ship is to be given up for adop­tion. Ever the antag­o­nist, Dar­row steps in to thwart Evvie’s escape plan, at which point she takes over, sum­mon­ing courage and a resolve she didn’t know she had.

Bowen’s roundly atmos­pheric set­ting nicely com­ple­ments the slow-brewing ten­sion among char­ac­ters, offer­ing as full a por­trait of her inti­mate cast of char­ac­ters as of the daily chal­lenges of their class and nat­u­ral­is­tic vil­lage ways. The book engag­ingly explores lone­li­ness and the moral rel­a­tiv­ity involved in valu­ing one’s fel­low crea­tures, and is engag­ing from the very first page.

A potent back­woods tale.