Niki Daly’s latest book, Old Bob’s Brown Bear is a sensitive account of a triangular relationship between a girl, her grandfather and a bear. The main character is a girl called Emma, who falls in love with her grandfather’s teddy bear and persuades the “Old Bob” of the title to part with it.
Instead of sitting on a dusty shelf between books, teddy has a fantastic holiday with Emma, and lives a life filled with trips to the beach, sunshine and zoo biscuits.
The illustrations show Emma changing from a little girl with short hair and a Hello Kitty handbag (as ever in Daly’s books, the detailed drawings add a great deal to the text) to a ballerina with a mermaid Barbie and a starry wand. In this new world that Emma inhabits, teddy no longer has a place and Emma graciously returns Old Bob’s teddy to him: “That’s okay, Old Bob, you can have Teddy. He’s a very old bear now.” And when Old Bob takes teddy, he smells “zoo biscuits and sticky fingers … sweet grass and fruit juice … salty sea and sun cream”, the reminders
of teddy’s life with Emma.
The love of a child (and most often a girl) for a teddy is a very common theme in children’s literature. In many story traditions there are stories of a girl who befriends an animal and, through her care for it, transforms it (and herself).
Daly’s book shares some of the features of this genre, but he puts a clever twist on it. The love relationship in Old Bob’s Brown Bear is not only one between Emma and her teddy. The teddy originally belongs to Old Bob (who does not know how to love it) and the teddy returns to Old Bob, who has learned to love it because it has been loved by Emma.
This book is a portrayal of the love between a girl and her grandfather, as much as between a girl and a teddy. Emma shows Old Bob how to love, but the teddy also becomes a physical memento of the small child that she was.
The recommended age for the book is four to five years, but my two-year old also loves it (and I am sure her grandfather will too).