Tunes for Bears to Dance To

Blurb

Tunes for Bears to Dance To is a young adult novel written by American author Robert Cormier that discusses themes of morality from the perspective of an 11-year-old named Henry. This novel also has many metaphors and ties to the Holocaust. This book is very loyal to Robert Cormier's style as it is very short and haunting. It is also in his vein of younger boys discovering darker sides of life and it is left unclear whether the protagonist did the right thing or not. The title originates from a line in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary: “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity."