Welcome to the most bizarre of the offshoots from Isabel Gaines' The Giving Bear, the little reader book that just keeps on giving.

Back in the Silver Age of comic books, DC editor Julius Schwartz was known to commission covers for his comics from artists with the instructions to come up with a striking image of an exciting or strange situation for one of the superheroes to be in. He'd then show the cover to a writer and task them with coming up with a suitable story to put behind it. I feel something similar must have happened here as this book has all of Josie Yee's illustrations from The Giving Bear but they've been shuffled, reversed, and flopped and surrounded with a brand new story by a different author.

Pooh is no longer being peer pressured into donating his unused honey pots to a charity drive. Now his friends want to help him fill those empty pots by going on a honey hunt with him. The wagons loaded with toys that Piglet and Tigger were contributing to the cause now become wagons loaded with honey hunting tools they hope will be useful in driving away bees and collecting honey. Christopher Robin no longer champions altruism, but instead is ready to enable Pooh's gluttony.

It's weird and not particularly good due to the amount of literary spackle required to make the new story fit with the repurposed pictures. But it makes for a fun game of compare and contrast.

(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... ) ( )

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