Michael MacTaggert

Public Domain Pooh!

I was baffled by this book for a long while as I read it, but I finally figured out its secret . . . only to realize that that did nothing to make it better or worthwhile.

A series of short chapters seems to tell stories of Winnie the Pooh and his friends fighting Heffalumps first in a skewed version of World War I but also in the bullring as matadors.

World War I? Bullfighting? This has to have something to do with Ernest Hemingway, I started to think.

And indeed some googling revealed that the text is derived from a collection of Hemingway's short stories that I had never heard of or read, In Our Time, which like Winnie-the-Pooh is in the public domain. The author of this short book has simply made some slight alterations to Hemingway's prose to insert the names of A. A. Milne's creations into these masculine vignettes of war and bloodsport.

But that is all the author did. The chapters are not woven together at all and everything feels disjointed and nonsensical as we rebound between random paragraphs from Hemingway's work, making this a pointless endeavor in the end.

p.s., The author of this book has declined copyright, so it too is in the public domain and available for free download at the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/in-our-wood

(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)