Lindsay Mattick had a story to tell. It was from her own family history. It was also a story that needed pictures to help tell it.
Sophie Blackall is an illustrator. She uses ink and watercolor paint. Her pictures have soft lines and muted colors. They were just right for Ms. Mattick’s story.
Together, Ms. Mattick’s words and Ms. Blackall’s images make up the book Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear. It won a high honor this year: the Caldecott Medal. The Caldecott Medal is given to the “most distinguished” children’s picture book from the previous year.
What made Finding Winnie the best? The book opens with a little boy named Cole. He wants a bedtime story. His mother tells him one. The soft pictures are calming—like a bedtime story should be.
The story the mother tells is true. It takes place about a hundred years ago in wartime. A Canadian soldier bought a bear cub. He took it to England. It lived with the soldiers for a time. Then the bear went to a zoo. Ms. Blackall pays attention to details. She made sure her illustrations were true to the time. What did people wear? How did they travel? What did the countryside look like? Her pictures “told the truth,” just like the story does.
At the zoo, Winnie the bear got visitors. One of those was a little boy named Christopher Robin. He named his teddy bear “Winnie.” He visited the zoo with his father, A.A. Milne. Mr. Milne decided to write stories about his own son and his teddy bear. They became the famous Winnie-the-Pooh stories. Ms. Mattick’s own great-grandfather was the soldier who gave Winnie to the zoo.
Children love the Pooh stories. Adults do too. Adults sometimes think back on things they loved from their childhood. They feel happy and sad at the same time. They feel a little bit homesick because of those memories. This feeling is called “nostalgia.”
The paintings in Finding Winnie bring out that feeling. Good pictures have power. They can change how people feel when they look at them. That’s one reason why Ms. Blackall won the award.
