I picked up Bella Pollen's The Summer of the Bear without any expectations. Although this is Pollen's fifth novel, I had never read anything by her before. In the time it took me to finish the first two or three sentences, I was already hooked: the characters, their feelings and their behavior seemed entirely real and true to me. When their diplomat father dies under mysterious circumstances at the British Embassy in Bonn, his three children and their mother each respond to the

—Nancy Pearl