Winnie's Great War
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
From the creative team behind the bestselling, Caldecott Medal--winning Finding Winnie comes an extraordinary wartime adventure seen through the eyes of the world's most beloved bear.
Here is a heartwarming imagining of the real journey undertaken by the extraordinary bear who inspired Winnie-the-Pooh. From her early days with her mama in the Canadian forest, to her remarkable travels with the Veterinary Corps across the country and overseas, and all the way to the London Zoo where she met Christopher Robin Milne and inspired the creation of the world's most famous bear, Winnie is on a great war adventure.
This beautifully told story is a triumphant blending of deep research and magnificent imagination. Infused with Sophie Blackall's irresistible renderings of an endearing bear, the book is also woven through with entries from Captain Harry Colebourn's real wartime diaries and contains a selection of artifacts from the Colebourn Family Archives. The result is a one-of-a-kind exploration into the realities of war, the meaning of courage, and the indelible power of friendship, all told through the historic adventures of one extraordinary bear.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Expanding upon their Caldecott-winning picture book, 2015's Finding Winnie, Blackall and Mattick add Greenhut (the Flat Stanley series) to their team for this amplified tale of the bear who traveled from the Canadian woods across the Atlantic during World War I to the London Zoo, where she became the inspiration for Milne's Winnie the Pooh. Narrated by a descendant of Captain Harry Colebourn, who adopted Winnie, and told to Colebourn's great-great-grandson, the story focuses on Winnie's gentle, fun-loving nature and her devotion to Colebourn throughout their journey in wartime Europe. Brief excerpts from Colebourn's diaries ground the book in historical reality, while Winnie's relationships with horses and rats even a Canadian infantry's billy goat create a warm animal story. Winnie expresses herself in language throughout the narrative, but she communicates with Colebourn through expressions and movements (" I'm not getting in,' Winnie said by lying down in the mud"). Well-detailed descriptions carry the reader along on the trip, and Colebourn and Winnie's strong friendship, rendered believably and movingly, is the emotional heart of the story. Final art not seen by PW. Ages 8 12. Authors' agents: (for Mattick) Jackie Kaiser, Westwood Creative Artists; (for Greenhut) Kim Witherspoon, InkWell Management. Illustrator's)
