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Journal Entry 1 by potok-fan from Turku, Varsinais-Suomi Finland on Monday, October 19, 2009
 Doing a blitz on registering so that I've got more books for people to choose from for ghir's birthday rabck!
I just finished reading this a few days ago. Very hard to categorize. For the first half of the book, I was saying it was a children's book written for grown-ups (absolutely not child-appropriate, mind). The best information is what I saw afterwards in a review in the Guardian (quoted below).
(photo = Christopher Milne)
Beneath the general sunshine shed by a beloved children's classic can lurk a very private shadow. "My father had got to where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders," wrote the grown-up Christopher Robin Milne many years after his father lent his name to the owner and friend of Winnie-the-Pooh. "He had filched from me my good name and left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son." Bullied by schoolmates and unable to shake off EH Shepard's image of him as a teddy bear-dragging six-year-old, Milne became estranged from his parents and ended up running a bookshop in Dartmouth... Charles Elton's Mr Toppit recasts Milne's story as a 20th-century morality tale with hints of both Hamlet and Potter-mania. (Rachel Aspden)
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Journal Entry 2 by potok-fan from Turku, Varsinais-Suomi Finland on Monday, October 19, 2009
Plot summary by James Smart, also from the Guardian: The woods around the Hayman family's Dorset home stretch for 300 acres, taking in caves, clearings and a bowl-like quarry. They are a fine landscape for the imagination, and the genial Arthur spins yarns around them, centred on a boy named Luke, the mysterious Mr Toppit and the foreboding Darkwood. When Arthur is hit by a cement truck in central London, a strange series of events sweeps his books to global success. Soon Mr Toppit's name is on the lips of punning politicians, book-lovers are crawling all over Arthur's forest and the Hayman family are struggling to negotiate a world that desperately wants a piece of them. Elton's neat debut allows the former literary agent to parody the publishing world, the puffed-up British film industry and entourage-packed LA. Not all of his characters are perfectly realised, but Mr Toppit builds into something special nonetheless, as Arthur's son Luke deals with school, crosses the Atlantic and uncovers the sad secrets that underpin his family and their cash-spewing franchise.
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Mr Toppit
