Vincent Jefferds

This story is downright bizarre.

One day a new visitor comes to the Hundred-Acre Wood. Wooly Bird is a knitted flying toy with a design that looks sort of Native American. Perhaps he's a migratory bird, having somehow made his way to England? He wants to befriend Pooh and the rest, but his energy and odd ways have a tendency to alienate everyone.

Kanga is shown to be either quite trusting or quite burnt-out, because she's immediately willing to let the stranger babysit Roo.

Owl gets especially angered by Wooly Bird, spewing some of the antibird intolerance he showed the penguin in The Best Bear in All the World and threatening violence reminiscent of the time he clouted Roo in Return to the Hundred Acre Wood. I'm not sure why so many writers want Owl to be a villain instead of the bore he is usually presented as.

Wooly Bird gets a chance to redeem himself, but it comes at the cost of a very traumatic unraveling that might leave little readers a bit messed up. Kanga gets some redemption too for her earlier reckless parenting and the unusual chance to save the day in the end.

Unfortunately, the story is told in an annoying variable rhyming scheme, but I'm still going to give it a passing grade just for giving me some weirdness the likes of which I had never seen before in my Pooh Project.

(My Pooh Project: I love Winnie the Pooh, and so does my wife. Having a daughter gave us a chance to indoctrinate her into the cult by buying and reading her every Pooh book we came across. How many is that? I’m going to count them this year by reading and reviewing one every day and seeing which month I finally run out. Track my progress here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/23954351-rod-brown?ref=nav_mybooks&she... )… (meer)

Here's the first reference I've ever seen that the Hundred-Acre Wood has a lake -- and one large enough to have a desert island at that! Poor Pooh becomes a castaway upon it, and, being a literary bear, ruminates on Robinson Crusoe as he confronts the wildlife and tries to survive the elements.

So, yeah, not your usual Pooh story.

It's almost wild enough to like, but it is told in rhyme and the constant, random changes in rhyme scheme (AABB, ABAB, AAA, AABBC, ABABC) and meter throughout the book drove me bonkers. And the ending just doesn't flow with what has come before.

(My Pooh Project: I love Winnie the Pooh, and so does my wife. Having a daughter gave us a chance to indoctrinate her into the cult by buying and reading her every Pooh book we came across. How many is that? I’m going to count them this year by reading and reviewing one every day and seeing which month I finally run out. Track my progress here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/23954351-rod-brown?ref=nav_mybooks&she... )… (meer)