By Annette Bay Pimentel
The true story of how a writer and an artist worked together to turn a boy's stuffed bear into Winnie-the-Pooh.
Everyone knows Winnie-the-Pooh, but not many children know he started as a real boy's stuffed bear and had to be made into a book by actual people. This tells that story as a conversation between Christopher Robin and Pooh, following how the writer A.A. Milne and the illustrator Ernest Shepard, who didn't always see eye to eye, put their heads together to shape Pooh's very first adventure. Along the way it pulls back the curtain on how a book actually gets made.
It hands a child something they already love and shows them it was made, by people, with a lot of back-and-forth. For a child who has ever wondered where books come from, that's genuinely thrilling. The metafictional touch, Christopher Robin and Pooh telling their own origin, keeps it playful instead of textbook-ish, and the mixed-media art gives you plenty to linger over. It landed right on Pooh's 100th birthday, which is a nice thing to mention.