This picture book skilfully weaves together the remarkable life cycle of Pacific salmon with an account of the first two years in the life of a young black bear, who feeds on the salmon to fatten up for hibernation. Because the bear cub is given a name and personality, and the salmon that nourish him are treated as a group, the story is not one of struggle between predator and prey. Fraser the bear remains the focus of the book.

Vancouver writer Maggie de Vries won the Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize for an earlier animal book, Tale of a Great White Fish, and does a fine job of bringing to life the events in the book – playing in the snow, learning to catch fish, making a den, and experiencing a scary attack by an adult male bear. Renné Benoit’s full-colour illustrations, which are realistic but still evocative and atmospheric, work well with the text.

Fraser is, in fact, a product tie-in, matched to a plush toy of the same name sold by Rocky Mountaineer Vacations on its trains to benefit the Pacific Salmon Foundation. The book stands on its own, however, as a realistic account of a bear cub’s life in the wild, humanized just enough to enable a child to empathize.

Several informative pages at the end give tips on bear safety (an important caution since the book opens with an image of a child holding a bear cub), facts about black bears and salmon, and a map of the West Coast showing the salmon’s amazing journey from the Aleutians to the Rocky Mountains, swimming as far as 12,000 kilometres in their lifetimes. As product tie-ins go, Fraser Bear is a worthy one.