Hazel Hutchins’ new picture book puts a different twist on the favourite childhood fantasy of a toy coming to life. Early one morning, toddler Yancy and his teddy, Bear, “change places” by putting on each other’s clothes. Bear becomes animate and Yancy becomes the passive toy that Bear carries around with him on the daily round of meals, shopping, and play. Adults interact with Bear, who still looks like a teddy bear, as though he were the child Yancy, and the real Yancy seems unable to move on his own although he can send special thought waves to Bear. In a novel for older readers, this could be quite a scary situation, and the jaunty tone of the text and the coziness of Ruth Ohi’s illustrations do not entirely counteract the eeriness.

This is the sort of fantasy that a young child may enter with glee – as A.A. Milne has shown – but the relationship between reality and make-believe, and between child and bear, can get rather confusing here, when the adults address the animate bear as “Yancy” while the narrative voice calls him “Bear,” and the child “Yancy.” The book plays with the important and puzzling issue of identity, and the young child’s concern with how putting on different clothes might turn him into a different person.

Ruth Ohi draws domestic details with a warmth that recalls the family scenes of Shirley Hughes; this particular happy family consists of Mother, who goes to work, and Grandfather, who stays home with Yancy. The illustrations are varied in their spatial relationship to the text, making interesting use of action sequences and of different sizes and perspectives. Both text and pictures give a delightful sense of how much Bear enjoys his day of physical activity in the guise of a little boy.