Tammi J. Santa Croce

This is allegedly a picture book, but the illustrations are small and the blocks of text are large. A simple story about gathering berries to make a thank-you pie for Kanga is stretched out with dull prose and numerous digressions -- Roo and Tigger play hide-and-seek, Roo goes missing, Pooh and Piglet go fishing and swimming ("'I'll watch you while you swim,' Pooh told Piglet." ~Say what now?~) -- that contribute nothing to the overall story and only serve to make this seem like one of the longest 32-page books I've ever read.

The text and pictures seem ill-fitted to the format -- like a bad cut-and-paste job -- and Disney does a lot of recycling, so I have to wonder if this book was originally intended for publication elsewhere in a different format but was repurposed as fodder for the My Very First Winnie the Pooh series when that didn't work out. It's 2002 publication date puts it amongst the last books in the series following a gap of a year or two, making it seem like an afterthought or a feeble attempt to extend the series. (The other book was Pooh's Honey Hunt which outright recycled art and story ideas from an earlier book in the series, Pooh, the Giving Bear.)

(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)