The Berenstain Bears and the Spooky Old Tree

Rating

Repetitive, overly simplistic pointless robbery book.

What? This isn't even-- there's a plot but no point. It's got very few words and it's very repetitive.

There are three bears. I can't tell if they're supposed to be Brother, Sister, and Honey or different bears. Well, given the 1978 copyright date, it's clearly pre-Honey, so it's just another bear who's wearing Honey's overalls. They go investigate a spooky old tree. It keeps saying, "Do they dare X? Yes, they dare." And they keep going through weird things in this creepy house that's kind of like a haunted house and they get more and more scared. At the end there's a giant bear and they crawl over him and he gets mad and chases him, and then they run back home, and that's the end. There's no real point. Pretty much everything is interchangeable. The characters are interchangeable. The plot points could have happened in any order. It's really not very interesting and the author didn't try very hard in writing a story. There's not even any reason for them to be in this Spooky Old Tree to begin with.

The best part: when they climb over a giant, sleeping, naked bear. That would be equivalent to climbing over a large, sleeping naked man in their world. It's just a weird thing to do. And it reveals the whole exercise as home invasion.

Message

None.

Publication Year
1978
Age Range
4-8
Number of Pages
48
Number of words on a typical page
12