Children's Literature - Kathleen Karr
The ups and downs of a little girl's tantrum as she searches for her missing stuffed animal are explored with psychological insight and wit by the master of years of adult tantrums. With his spare lines (visual and verbal), Feiffer manages to transfer all the angst of his older characters to his young heroine. You don't get warm and fuzzy parents in Feiffer's New Yorker sort of world, but you do get to see the formation of an urban child.
School Library Journal
(PreS-Gr 2) A picture book with lots of child appeal. When a young girl loses her best toy, she plays detective to find it. After consulting other family members to no avail, she follows her sister's suggestion to throw another stuffed animal on the chance that it will land in the same place. The ploy uncovers lots of other lost items but no bear. The mystery is solved when the child goes to bed and her mother lifts up the covers. Hand-lettered text, dialogue balloons, and the breezy line of Feiffer's recognizable style of illustration form the perfect vehicle for this familiar story. The first-person voice realistically conveys the narrator's emotions and dilemma in a way to which children will relate. Effective use of comic-strip panels and frames along with double-page spreads heighten the tension and build to the satisfying conclusion. Both girl and story are winners.Julie Cummins, New York Public Library.
Horn
With great comic insight, Feiffer captures the high drama that ensues when a child misplaces a beloved possession. Mom is too busy to help find the lost bear, and conscientious Dad says, "I want you to find it for yourself, and that will be a lesson to you to remember where you put things," so our small heroine turns to big sister, who helpfully responds, "I have never never never played with your stupid bear, and I want you to stop playing with my nail polish!" Feiffer's loose-lined cartoon style effectively blends text and illustration for optimum comic timing; the varying perspectives and size and placement of the frames extends the narrative drama as well as the characters' emotions. Feiffer has a knowing parental eye for his protagonist's antics, as in the four-block spread reading, "Nobody will help me find my bear. / So I cried. / And nobody stopped me. / So I stopped myself." He also offers genuine sympathy: the next spread shows the forlorn little girl drawn with no color against a large brown background, lamenting, "But I know it's gone / forever." As sisters will, big sister comes around to offer advice after all, suggesting that they throw another toy in hopes that it will land in the same place as the lost bear. This method uncovers a variety of other missing items, with which the girl plays happily until bedtime-when she shamefully realizes she's forgotten all about her bear. As she begins to howl anew, indicting her mother for refusing to help, Bearsy appears-of course-tucked safely under the bedcovers. Young children will relate to the desperate search for a favorite toy while parents (and older siblings) will smile and nod in recognition at this very funny and affectionate family satire, raised almost to the scale of full-blown grand opera.
Kirkus Reviews
Following her mother's advice to "think like a detective," a desperate child searches her gloriously cluttered room and everywhere else for her lost bear. Naturally, it turns up at bedtime waiting under the sheets. Like Feiffer's cartoons, this is not for short attention spans, as the search is prolonged and wordy; still, so intense is the child's concentration that sometimes the background vanishes and she seems to burst out of the story to peer along the surfaces of the pages, and children, at least, will enjoy surveying the immense haul of toys, clothes, books, animals, and rubble littering the shelves, floor, and bed. An energetically drawn, comically exaggerated reprise of a universal domestic experience. (Picture book. 6-8)
