Catholic Fiction

Reviewed by Debra Murphy

Author Regina Doman has re-worked the venerable “Snow White and Rose Red” fairy tale, one of the Grimm Brothers’ most memorable, into a cracking good suspense yarn for young adults, and the young at heart of all ages.

Blanche and Rose Brier are a Sense-and-Sensibility pair of teenagers newly arrived, with their Widowed mother, in New York City after the untimely death of their father. While devoted to one another and their mother, an Emergency Room nurse, the girls couldn’t be more unalike. Blanche is cautious and reserved, and her skepticism, verging on cynicism, at times extends even to her faith. The younger Rose, meanwhile, an impulsive redhead, is trusting, romantic and enthusiastic to the point of recklessness—or so it seems to her mother-hen-like older sister. Coming as the girls do from a rural, homeschooled environment, the City seems often huge and scary and difficult to navigate—a suitable modern stand-in for the “dark forest” of the Grimm Brothers’ dark imagination. Blanche especially struggles with chronic anxiety, and cannot even find comfort in school, a bland post-Vatican II Catholic high school gutted of all beauty and a good deal of its intellectual rigor. The quiet Blanche finds herself frequently bullied by a clique of “popular” kids, among whom is a young man of dubious character whose eye is always on Rose.

The Brier family’s isolated existence is suddenly thrown open to a bit of excitement, coupled (or so Blanche feels) with a whiff of danger when their mother is assisted on their winter-icy doorstep by a mysterious young stranger who calls himself “Bear”. Bear’s alarming appearance—he sports dirty dreadlocks and is apparently homeless—inspires sympathy and pity from Rose and her mother, but Blanche fears he may be a thief or a drug-dealer; she is more than uneasy when her mother invites Bear inside for something to eat and a bit of medical attention for his frostbitten feet.

In the warmth of the Brier living room, however, the formidable Bear finally begins to take on more human dimensions, and he is revealed as a well-educated, even gentlemanly young man with a mysterious past the secrets of which the girls (along with the reader) soon become bent on discovering: Why is a gifted young man like Bear out on the streets? Why did he spend time in a juvenile prison? Why do the kids in the high school insist he’s a drug-dealer? And what do all these secrets have to do with the brutal murder of a priest several years before?

The answer to these questions are answered by Doman in a most suspenseful manner, complete with a very nice bit of romance and a thrilling climax in an abandoned church. What was especially fine, for this reader, is that the hearty storytelling is served up with a challenging sauce of potentially difficult themes, beautifully handled, dealing with difficulties that all young people must face to one degree or another: death and grief; the tension between caution and hope (being “wise as a serpent” and “innocent as a dove”; the tension between reality and appearance, and the danger of rash judgment; the frequent clash between popularity and principles; whether art is about Form or Truth, or both.

The heart of all mystery and fantasy stories–and The Shadow of the Bear is a bit of both–is the sense that something mysterious and important is going on beneath the mundane surfaces of life. Or, as Rose comments at one point, “Have you ever felt that there was something going on in life that not everyone was aware of?”

For those who are into audio books, as I am), there’s a very nice audio dramatisation of the book available as well, with a particularly enjoyable bah-humbug performance by Leonardo de Filippis as the disturbing Mr. Freet.