2022 Finalist: Young Adult Science Book

The Loneliest Polar Bear: A True Story of Survival and Peril on the Edge of a Warming World, by Kale Williams. Crown, 2021.

The Loneliest Polar Bear is the heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful story of Nora, a polar bear born at the Columbus Zoo, abandoned by her mother and precariously raised by zookeepers. Humans rarely get as close to a polar bear as Nora’s keepers got to their fuzzy charge. But the two species have long been intertwined. Tracing Nora’s lineage back to Alaska, Kale Williams reveals how her father, Nanuq, was orphaned when an Inupiat hunter killed his mother, leaving Nanuq to be sent to a zoo. That hunter, Gene Agnaboogok, now faces some of the same threats of climate change as these wild bears—diminishing sea ice and rising temperatures. Sweeping and tender, The Loneliest Polar Bear explores the fraught relationship humans have with the natural world, the exploitative and sinister causes of the environmental mess we find ourselves in, and how the fate of polar bears is not theirs alone.