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A review by margeryb
Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World's Most Famous Bear by Lindsay Mattick
5.0
I read a lot of picture books in my day-to-day work as a librarian that I do not record on here, but this was a particularly wonderful little book that I needed to write about it.
This is a quick recount of the true story behind Winnie the Pooh, both the bear cub named Winnie and the teddy bear that got named Winnie by a little boy named Christopher Robin who saw the real Winnie in the London Zoo. These two stories are encased in a framing story of a mother telling this story of a bear to her son as a bed time story, a mother who is a version of the author, the great great granddaughter of Captain Harry Coleman, the man who adopted the bear cub Winnie before later placing him in the London Zoo. This framing device is particularly wonderful because she uses little interruptions in the tale, like her son's questions about what certain words mean, to explain that to the reader, in a way that might naturally happen when an adult is reading to a child and needs to stop and explain this.
It might be because a *certain time of month* is pending, but I got teary-eyed at the end. This line (“Sometimes,' I said, 'you have to let one story end so the next one can begin.''How do you know when that will happen?''You don't,' I said. 'Which is why you should always carry on.”) sounded so much like something that would be in an actual Winnie the Pooh story, it gave me some childhood nostalgia, because it was always those little insights made Winnie the Pooh stories so interesting to me as a child.
This is a quick recount of the true story behind Winnie the Pooh, both the bear cub named Winnie and the teddy bear that got named Winnie by a little boy named Christopher Robin who saw the real Winnie in the London Zoo. These two stories are encased in a framing story of a mother telling this story of a bear to her son as a bed time story, a mother who is a version of the author, the great great granddaughter of Captain Harry Coleman, the man who adopted the bear cub Winnie before later placing him in the London Zoo. This framing device is particularly wonderful because she uses little interruptions in the tale, like her son's questions about what certain words mean, to explain that to the reader, in a way that might naturally happen when an adult is reading to a child and needs to stop and explain this.
It might be because a *certain time of month* is pending, but I got teary-eyed at the end. This line (“Sometimes,' I said, 'you have to let one story end so the next one can begin.''How do you know when that will happen?''You don't,' I said. 'Which is why you should always carry on.”) sounded so much like something that would be in an actual Winnie the Pooh story, it gave me some childhood nostalgia, because it was always those little insights made Winnie the Pooh stories so interesting to me as a child.