Return to the Hundred Acre Wood

Listeners who settle in to hear these new Winnie-the-Pooh stories will find good friends, good food (including lots of honey, of course), and good adventures. David Benedictus, who dramatized A.A. Milne's Pooh stories for audio, succeeds admirably in staying faithful to the spirit of the originals. Jim Dale is a marvel. Without relying on any of his voices from the Harry Potter series, he nonetheless populates an entire small wood: His Rabbit gets a Scottish accent; his Piglet squeaks; his Eeyore is appropriately gloomy. Dale even sings Pooh's "hums," the rhyming songs he makes up. The whole is an utterly charming audio production that evokes the feeling of never-ending childhood summers. J.M.D. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

October 19, 2009
Christopher Robin returns from boarding school (80 years later) in this authorized but largely forgettable third volume of stories about Pooh, Piglet and the denizens of Milne's famous forest. Missing is the charm of the first book, mediated by an adult narrator creating a tableau for his child's imaginative play with a coterie of stuffed friends. Like the first books, there are 10 stories, but they are aged up to reflect Christopher's new interests—the play here involves a spelling bee, cricket, the creation of a school, the use of a thesaurus, atlas, dictionary, etc. A new character, Lottie the Otter, joins Rabbit and Owl to make a trio of the sanctimonious. Even saintly Kanga—Kanga!—loses her patience with Roo. There are a few inspired moments, including Rabbit's ill-conceived plan to lure his Friends and Relations to participate in a census using carrots and shortbread. (Rabbit also gets the best line: “Happy may be all very well, Eeyore, but it doesn't butter any parsnips.”) Burgess's illustrations are serviceable and resemble the originals, but, again, topping Shepard's originals proves a tough act to follow. All ages.