Touching Spirit Bear

Touching Spirit Bear explores the concept of wilderness survival as a form of punishment that leads toward the path of healing.

Sixteen-year-old Cole is banished to a remote Alaskan island where he will spend a year alone as a consequence for the brutal beating of a classmate. Enraged that he has no recourse but to serve this Circle Justice, Cole defiantly burns his supplies before trying to escape. Of course he is stuck there, and eventually he meets up with a spirit bear that mauls him. On the edge of death, Cole realizes that his ability to survive in the civilized world is somehow connected to his ability to survive alone on this island.

This is one of my favorite teen lit books. The accessible elements in this work that might connect to a child's schema include divorce, a parent with alcoholism, bad-boy outcast, last-chance with the law, and dealing with social services. Bringing in Native American culture as a way to work around these problems is an intriguing concept that has hooked more than one ambivalent child and transformed him into a reader.