Smarty Books No. 4: The Bear Ate Your Sandwich
Smart and sweet picture books to inspire young readers
Welcome back to Smarty Books, a monthly newsletter featuring smart and sweet picture books to inspire young readers. (5 minute read)
Today’s book, The Bear Ate Your Sandwich, by Julia Sarcone-Roach, is one of my favorite humorous books for children. The ending completely surprised and delighted me the first time I read it.
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Summary
In The Bear Ate Your Sandwich, an unknown narrator explains what happened to “your sandwich.” It starts with a bear who is accidentally transported to the big city where he has many adventures exploring the sights and smells until he discovers the sandwich. He tries to eat it as sneakily as possible, but he is discovered and retreats to his forest home. And then, the narrator is revealed, and I’m not going to tell you who it is!
Why I love this book
The surprise ending totally got me. I had to read the book again right away and decide what really happened to the sandwich.
The interplay of the text and the art is fabulous and adds to the humor. The bear’s city exploits are described with nature terminology, and this mismatch between the text and what’s actually happening in the art is hilarious. Older children and adults will laugh a lot. Youngest children might need a little bit of explanation.
The book is so imaginative. No one in the city is alarmed to see the bear roaming around. The bear’s city activities are funny— some of them are slightly naughty like bathing in a fountain at the park, but others are normal kid activities like going down a slide.
Julia Sarcone-Roach is such a talented artist! The illustrations are painted, and the softer style is unique among picture books.
Author Interview
Julia Sarcone-Roach is the author and illustrator of The Bear Ate Your Sandwich. She shares the inspiration for this book and news of her upcoming projects below, including a bonus preview of one of the illustrations for her latest book out this June.
Sarah W: What was the genesis of The Bear Ate Your Sandwich?
Julia Sarcone-Roach: One cold day on my way to work, I came up out of the subway to the street and paused on the sidewalk.
I was wearing a dark puffy jacket with a furry hood in a sea of other dark puffy jackets. I felt like I was both invisible and in everyone’s way, like a bumbling bear. In that moment I imagined a black bear standing quietly on the sidewalk in the middle of a colorful, busy city block.
When I got to work, I doodled that image and wondered why a bear might be in city. The story grew from there.
Sarah W: What did you enjoy most about working on it?
Julia Sarcone-Roach: Painting the final art tends to be the most enjoyable part of working on any book for me. While developing this story, it was also a lot of fun to walk around and think about the city from the perspective of a bear. What would a bear eat in a city? Where would a bear go? I’d walk down the street and think about what the buildings would look like to me if I was a bear, or what the sidewalk would feel like under my paws. It was a great exercise to walk around and think like a bear.
Also, quite a few sandwiches were eaten as research, so that was nice too.
Sarah W: What's next for you?
Julia Sarcone-Roach: Next up is The Ice Cream Vanishes! It is another bear adventure, this time with a squirrel pal and in search of a particular treat.
Squirrel would like to be a magician, but can’t seem to find the right combination of magic words and snacks to vanish. After the mysterious disappearance of an ice cream cone left on a hot rock in the sun, Squirrel has finally done it, but how? Can Bear and Squirrel repeat this performance? The animals of the forest join in to help and in the end, it turns out everyone is good at magic.
The Ice Cream Vanishes will be released on June 20th. For anyone interested, signed copies are available for pre-order now through two local bookstores, the BookMark Shoppe and Books of Wonder, and come with a complimentary art print. Any teachers and librarians who pre-order through BookMark Shoppe can also enter to win a virtual author visit!
Sarah W: When you were writing The Bear Ate Your Sandwich, at what point did you realize who the narrator of the story was?
***SPOILER ALERT***
Julia Sarcone-Roach: That’s a great question. It was not right away! The book began as a series of sketches of a bear wandering, mostly unobserved, through a city. In one vignette, the bear climbed into and out of an apartment window, knocking over a vase. The moment is seen by the resident dog, who barks at the bear, and is then blamed for the mess. So it began as a small detail and became the structure of the book.
***SPOILER OVER***
At the same time, I had been thinking more about book titles. After reading more picture books out loud, I’d noticed that the title of a picture book really becomes the first line, and I wanted to play with that. For me, good titles are hard to come up with, so I was excited to find one that might make people smile. ‘Bear’ and ‘Sandwich’ seemed like a funny place to begin.
Sarah W: I saw that you attended Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In my work as a college and career counselor, I get a lot of beautiful posters from them. Did you always know that you wanted to illustrate books for children? Or what was your path to becoming an illustrator?
Julia Sarcone-Roach: I have always loved children’s books and making art. I worked as a children’s bookseller for over ten years beginning in high school. After graduation, I attended RISD and studied film/animation/video. I found that I missed painting but discovered that animation was a good fit, which let me still create art by hand. Animation is like a sequential art cousin of the picture book. After graduation, I returned to bookselling where I met friends in children’s book publishing who encouraged me on a path to illustration.
More about Julia
Julia Sarcone-Roach is the author and illustrator of The Secret Plan,
Subway Story, There Are No Bears in this Bakery, and The Bear Ate Your Sandwich, which was an Ezra Jack Keats Honor Award winner, a New York Times bestseller, and an excuse to eat many sandwiches. She is also the illustrator of Incredible Inventions by Lee Bennett Hopkins and the Ezra Jack Keats Honor Award book Excellent Ed by Stacy McAnulty.
Julia lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, NY and runs across a surprising number of wild animals but, to date, no bears. Her new book, The Ice Cream Vanishes will be released on June 20th, 2023.
See more of Julia’s art and get book updates on Instagram @jsarconeroach. Her website is coming very soon: www.jsarconeroach.com.
The Bear Ate Your Sandwich was published in 2015 by Alfred A. Knopf.
May News
My book, El pato tiene más, is now available in the TPRS Books Ebook Library. Spanish teachers, check it out if you subscribe or look at the seven-day trial option.
Up Next
I’m experimenting with giving a book preview for the next month so readers have a chance to look at the book ahead of time and get excited about hearing from the author/illustrator. Let me know if you enjoy getting a preview.
Tune in next month to hear from Julie Morstad about her book, Today.
Happy reading until we meet again!
— Sarah
Share this post with the person in your life who can’t get enough sandwiches.
Sounds adorable! Must find one for my boys. ❤️