Lydia Dabcovich

The Polar Bear Son retells an Inuit story about an old woman who raises an orphaned bear cub until her village turns against it, illustrated in a flat cold palette that carries the Arctic without prettifying it. Dabcovich was born in Bulgaria, left in the nineteen sixties, and worked as an illustrator in Boston for decades, drawing other people's books far more often than her own. The source of the story is credited on the page, which was not standard practice for retold Indigenous material when she made it.