Kelly Ball

Public domain Pooh! But alas, the worse sort.

I was excited to think that a honey-addicted Pooh might go through a twelve-step program to get that sticky monkey off his back (and paws!) but, no, this is just a pamphlet listing the twelve steps of the Alcoholics Anonymous program with a littering of short quotes from Pooh and other folks like Victor Hugo, Elton John, Russell Brand, C. S. Lewis, etc. Occasionally the authors paraphrase or interpret one of the steps, but it's mostly quote city in here.

Though the authors talk about Pooh being in the public domain early on, they seem to have missed the point as none of a sampling of their Pooh quotes I looked up are actually from A. A. Milne's first book but are rather from internet memes or Disney's very-much-still-copyrighted movies.

The only thing from the first Winnie-the-Pooh book that I can see in here are Ernest H. Shepard's illustrations. And the authors don't even use them all, choosing to print the same picture on two or three pages in a row before moving on to another one to print two or three times in a row. They also print the full text of each step on every page dealing with that step, making up a fifth to a quarter or even half of the text on any given page.

Repetitive, tedious, and disappointing.

(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... )… (altro)