Books like Chasing the Bear

Way back in 2009 I read Robert B. Parker’s new Spenser novel The Professional and wrote up a review bitching about how he fell into bad habits late in his career. Then he died a few months later, and I felt slightly guilty about bashing a series I once loved so I started re-reading them from the beginning. I figured I would just hit the early ones and quit before I started getting irritated. Yet I found myself compulsively going through all the Spenser books until I got to the point where I had re-read and reviewed almost all of them here on Goodreads.The one I’d never read was this which RBP wrote as a young adult story about the adventures of Spenser in his youth. Frankly, when it came out, I was pretty sour about the whole series and was not interested because it seemed like the whole thing would just be a rehashing of a story Spenser told in Pastime about an encounter he had with a bear when he was a teenager out hunting with his father. That brief story was one of my favorite bits of the entire series, and I worried that RBP had screwed it up in some kind of cash grabbing attempt to do a YA book.After going through all the other Spensers, including the two new ones written by Ace Atkins who has taken over the series and injected new life into it, I decided that finally reading this would be a good way to cap off this personal project that had somehow spiraled into an obsessive compulsive need to endlessly bitch about Susan Silverman. (Plus, if you include this one, it makes RBP’s official Spenser count 40 books instead of 39, and that’s a nice round number.)So my hopes weren’t high for this, and in the early going, I wasn’t thinking much of it. Spenser and Susan are hanging out in Boston, and she gets him talking about his past which means we aren’t free of Susan even in a story from before Spenser met her. It might not have been quite so irritating if these would have been framing chapters, but instead the present day interludes are scattered through the book as she offers her brilliant insight into what effect those events had on Spenser. And even in a young adult book, RBP couldn’t resist about 127 references to Susan having a PhD from Harvard. Spenser tells Susan how his mother died in childbirth and he was raised by his father and two uncles in Wyoming. It wasn’t a typical upbringing with the three men equally sharing the responsibility of taking care of Spenser. They taught him how to cook, box, carpentry and took turns reading a set of great novels to him every night. All of this had been in Pastime including a story of the three men beating the hell out of a bunch of drunks who had bullied young Spenser. As I feared, the bear story was something that suffered from some changes. (view spoiler)[In the original story, Spenser’s father takes him to a bar and orders him his first Scotch after he saves himself from a bear by not panicking and holding his ground. In this version, Spenser’s dad takes him home where he and the uncles have a drink while Spenser has a Coke with them to acknowledge his bravery. I guess you really shouldn’t have teens drinking in a YA novel, but that was a key note in the story so I didn’t like the newer version. (hide spoiler)]