Winnie the Pooh and Me

This picture book is a clever homage to the author and creator of Pooh and to the illustrator, E. H. Shepard, whose realisation of A.A. Milne’s characters is how they properly are and always will be, despite the intervention of Walt Disney. Jeanne Willis, inspired by the poem Us Two from Milne’s verse collection Now We are Six, takes Milne’s characters and puts them in a poem that has all the playfulness, warmth, wit and richness of character of the original. The illustrations by Mark Burgess honour Shepard but seem to me to show a rather younger Christopher Robin, which possibly makes the book more an introduction to the stories than a sequel. I am not too sure about the relationship of the story to the illustrations. The story features Christopher Robin and Pooh wondering about two friends who are following them. These finally turn out to be their shadows, which I imagine will be a revelation to most readers, since neither Christopher Robin nor Pooh pays any attention to them for most of the book, unlike other possibilities, like the clouds in the sky shaped like their friends and, latterly, Heffalumps. My suspicion is that Jeanne Willis wrote the text first, where, without the illustrations, the poem sets a puzzle which ends in a very satisfactory surprise. The illustrations, however, are likely to confuse the reader by giving more pictorial weight to the other possibilities considered by the foolish pair.