Reviewed by Carissa

TITLE:  Who We Are

SERIES:  Bear, Otter, and the Kid #2

AUTHOR:  TJ Klune

PUBLISHER:  Dreamspinner Press

LENGTH:  350 pages

BLURB:  

Bear, Otter, and the Kid survived last summer with their hearts and souls intact. They’ve moved into the Green Monstrosity, and Bear is finally able to admit his love for the man who saved him from himself.

But that’s not the end of their story. How could it be?

The boys find that life doesn’t stop just because they got their happily ever after. There’s still the custody battle for the Kid. The return of Otter’s parents. A first trip to a gay bar. The Kid goes to therapy, and Mrs. Paquinn decides that Bigfoot is real. Anna and Creed do… well, whatever it is Anna and Creed do. There are newfound jealousies, the return of old enemies, bad poetry, and misanthropic seagulls. And through it all, Bear struggles to understand his mother’s abandonment of him and his brother, only to delve deeper into their shared past. What he finds there will alter their lives forever and help him realize what it’ll take to become who they’re supposed to be.

Family is not always defined by blood. It’s defined by those who make us whole—those who make us who we are.

REVIEW:  

There is something about sequels that scares the crap out of me.  Not in the ‘I’m going to get shanked by a crazy dude’ kind of way, but in a ‘this book has the power to ruin something that I love and I am not sure I am ready to commit to something that could rip my heart out and use it as a hockey puck’ kind of way.  I don’t trust easily when it comes to sequels.  Hence why it took me so damn long to get around to reading Who We Are, the sequel to Bear, Otter, and the Kid.  But I had an adventure to finish (my Great Bear, Otter, and the Kid Adventure–or GBOATKA to be succinct) so I closed my eyes (and then opened them when I realized how hard it is to read with them closed) and decided to trust that TJ Klune would not hurt me too badly.

Ha. Ha ha. Hahahahahaha.  *Wipes tears of laughter (and pain) from my eyes*

Don’t look at me like that, you’ll understand soon enough.

GBOATKA Part Two

Wherein Our Reviewer Breaks Her Heart

Life is grand, perfect even, for Bear, Otter, and the Kid.  Well, ok, that is a bit of an overstatement.  But they are reasonably sure that Bear and Ty’s mother isn’t going to come take Ty away from them (not even over Bear’s dead body), and Otter and Bear have finally started to build a future together.  They own a house (who buys another person a house to prove they love them?? (Otter, of course!))–even if it is green and two steps closer to ugly than handsome–and the Kid is starting to feel safe enough to just be a kid, not just The Kid.  So life is grand(-er than it was).

Except they don’t know for sure that the wicked bitch of the west coast Ty’s mother is going to just let them keep Ty.  And they don’t know how they are going to handle living together, all three of them, like a family.  And they sure as hell don’t know how Otter’s parents are going to handle finding out that Otter loves Bear (in a totally non-brotherly fashion).  And they don’t know how Ty is going to handle moving up a grade–or where the hell he seemed to have acquired a soft-spoken, and slightly mysterious, best friend.  They don’t know a lot of things, and if there is one thing that Bear does not handle well, it is the unknown.

It is a good thing he has Otter to help keep him grounded.  ‘Cause he does have that…right?

Not to be hyperbolic, but this book destroyed me.  Like wrapped me in a warm blanket, gave me a warm cup of coffee…and the proceeded to rip my heart to pieces right in front of me while it laughed (laughed!) at my giant Wookiee tears (and can I just say…I do not possess a good crying face.  I didn’t just look like a Wookiee, I looked like snotty, half-drowned Wookiee.  My cats ran in terror.  My family shunned me.  My Lego!Cyberman turned away from my shameful display of emotion in disgust.  It was not pretty).  And yet…I don’t think there are very many books that I love more than this.

There is something so familiar about Bear and Otter and Ty.  Something that feels less like a story and more like a family that I might have known once upon a time.  Whenever I came back to this story I felt like I was coming home.  I don’t know how Klune did it.  There is nothing so spectacularly unique about this story.  There is nothing that makes me shout “Well, I’ve never seen that before!”  But there is everything that is good–great, even–about storytelling.  About making a world so real that you miss it when you have to put the book down.  That you find yourself, weeks later, still feeling as keenly as you did when you were still turning the pages.  The highs here were high–and you laughed, oh god, did you laugh–and the lows were low–and you cried, oh god, how you cried–and the middle became a safe place and a scary place all at once, because you didn’t know what Klune was going to do to you next.  You never know just how the story is going to hurt you, or how it could possibly heal you, but you trust–oh god, how you trust–that in the end you’ll be able to walk away, not the same, but maybe a tad bit better.

Bear still has his issues–boy does he–but he is not quite as fragile to the touch as he was in the previous book.  Though, he was never weak, just balanced rather perilously on a cliff.  Here he seems to have found better footing.  He trusts Otter more–just not all those ridiculously cute exes he seems to have wandering around!—and is starting to be more than just Bear who raised the Kid, or Bear who secretly loved Otter but couldn’t for the life of him admit to it.  He is starting to be Bear, who is Bear.  Not without raising Ty. Not without loving Otter.  But Bear who is finally finding a life that isn’t just about surviving the next 24hrs.

Even if that whole growing up thing threw him in the path of Isaiah who should take his homewrecking flirty lips and go put them on someone else’s Bear.  Or, you know, just fuck off altogether.

One of the things that I loved about this story is how we get a lot more of Bear’s backstory–especially in regards to his mother (though god only knows that mother is a highly inaccurate term for that woman).  We get to see Bear growing up, and I think that really helped us see just how Derrick became Bear.  Not just the name that Ty bestowed upon him, but the man who raised his little brother when the world was going to shit around him.

We also get to see how Bear really fell for Otter.  And it wasn’t all in one drunken kiss, or when Otter told him he loved him.  It wasn’t just on a beach with a vengeful seagull.  Or waking up beside him every morning knowing that Otter meant it when he said it was forever.  It was all those things–and so much more.  It was all the little things that Otter did when they were both growing up.  All the things that Otter was, that made Bear want him.  And while in the first book you might have a hard time trusting that what they have is solid enough to withstand all of Bear’s waves, or Ty’s earthquakes…here, because you start to really see the love story of Bear and Otter, you start to actually believe in it.

This story never goes where I thought it would. Didn’t tell the story I was expecting–even when it was.  You go into this thinking you know Bear, you know Otter, and Creed, and Anna, and Ty.  You think that you are prepared for anything that is thrown your way…and yet you never are.  And some of it is heartbreaking.  Some of it makes you cry because you are laughing so hard.  And some of it (rather a lot, actually) is just so beautifully written, that you’re kinda annoyed you’ve never been able to make your words as clear, and right, and perfectly messy as the ones that Klune sticks on the page.

I tend not to give five-star ratings unless the book surprises me in some way.  It is never the same, because books are never the same, but I need to look at a book and say, at the end, “this one will stick with me.”  And this one does.  It sticks in all the good and uncomfortable ways a great book should.  It sticks because it broke me…but it also stuck me back together again. In the end.

RATING:  

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