Although Winnie himself first appears in the Milne’s poetry collection When You Were Very Young, this book is really the first outing for Pooh and his friends. I absolutely loved it too. While I find that some children’s literature that tries to be whimsical fails to truly capture my imagination, that was not the case at all for this book – I was completely charmed throughout.
There’s not that much of an overall story to the book, but each chapter gives you an adventure (or misadventure) in the lives of Pooh, Christopher Robin, Piglet, Rabbit, and the rest of the animals in Hundred Acre Wood. Sometimes these are just light-hearted silly things like Pooh getting stuck in a rabbit hole, but other times there are slightly more tense situations, like when the woods are flooded during storm.
Regardless of what’s happening at any point in the book, each time I read any of it, it was like a trip to a world that I liked to exist in. The illustrations by E. H. Shepard which appear throughout the book really reinforced this too, with delightfully charming scenes showing Rabbit’s underground home, or the characters having fun together in a clearing in the woods.
What I admired the most about this book was that I felt it had perfectly captured two aspects of childhood. On the one hand, it’s all completely rooted in childhood imagination (after all, every one of the characters is based on a toy owned by the real Christopher Robin) with the ways that the characters think about the world mirroring the mindsets of the youngest children – but it also captures that carefree feeling that you have when you’re very young. The way they fill their days captures how it felt to have what seemed like an infinite period of time to yourself over the summer holiday,
Although it’s simple in a lot of ways, there’s very little that I could say against this book. It’s one of the best things that I’ve read in a while and is a wonderfully beautiful piece of writing. It even addresses Pooh’s name changing from Edward to Winnie, which I appreciated since it wasn’t necessary but feeds into the authenticity of the book. I definitely recommend reading this if you like any children’s literature.
Rating: 9.1/10
