Mother Bruce
by PizzaPuppy
Mother Bruce is a fantastic new addition to our picture book collection. This story introduces us to Bruce, a grumpy black bear who doesn't like much of anything. The one thing Bruce does like are delicious fresh eggs! Bruce decides to cook the eggs into a fancy recipe he finds on the internet. He collects ingredients from his surroundings, and prepares the eggs for hard-boiling. But when he goes to fetch more wood after the stove fizzles, he returns to a great surprise-- the eggs he was going to eat have hatched into goslings! The goslings immediately become attached to Bruce and perceive him as their mother. Bruce tries everything he possibly can to get rid of the goslings, but they always come waddling back. Bruce realizes he is stuck with these children, and raises them himself from annoying baby goslings to stubborn teenagers-- all the way to boring adult geese. He thinks he will finally be rid of them when the geese fly south for the winter, but the geese haven't learned migration from poor Mother Bruce. Bruce must think quickly in order to get his geese down south for the winter. A clever surprise at the end twists the story in a fun and humorous way.
This book features a plot that makes it very similar to Wolf's Chicken Stew and Fox and Fluff, where a usually predatory animal learns to care for a more gentle creature. However, Mother Bruce extends the story and shows us how the family grows with the passage of time. This book has a great sense of humor that both children and adults will love, and is certainly something to check out!
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