Hey Alanis Morissette, here's some irony for you: Disney opts to adapt a movie about a character who regrets living an "efficient" life by choosing the most cost-effective author they could find. Having not seen the movie, I am most qualified to judge Elizabeth Rudnick's version, and that version is not very inspired. It's full of hackneyed prose.
The story itself is quite familiar, comparable to everything from A Christmas Carol to movies like Big and Hook. It's the story of a grown man who rediscovers how to enjoy life again. Big was a breakthrough movie for Tom Hanks, and approached the story quite cleverly. Hanks didn't play the man who does the rediscovering, but rather the child magically transformed into an adult, who works for a toy company, helping his boss, well, you know. Hook was an update of J.M. Barrie's classic Peter Pan, in which Peter had grown up and, well, turned out much like Christopher Robin in this story.
Except in this story, the magic is all gone. Again, I don't know if it's Rudnick's doing or the screenwriters or some other morose doing. (Ah, speaking of morose, one of the things you can definitely pin on Rudnick is a baffling inability to understand the character of Eeyore.) Hook was all about the magic of Peter's original adventures, and how he rediscovered it. Christopher Robin (again, at least Rudnick's version) is all about a by-the-numbers, magic-free narrative that doesn't seem to have the first clue what Christopher originally meant to the tales of Winnie the Pooh. He's just there for plot convenience, and that's the entire story.
And it's all written at such a poor level, such a basic level, with so little imagination, so little heart...Rudnick seems to have developed her craft not at all, as if this were a school writing project, and her first project at that. That's what bad writers are like. They have no clue that the words they use have just as much meaning as the story itself, that if there's no art, there's no heart. And for a story about heart, about rediscovering the joys of childhood, there's no joy in the words. That's not Pooh! That's just a job. And the opposite of the apparent message of this story.
I gambled that the book might be a fun way to discover the movie, that it might have a chance to stand up with Milne's original tales. But there's no reason anyone ought to remember this book in a hundred years.
Thinking about it just makes me depressed. Ah, now I know how Eeyore feels...