Okay, first things first: I love the Berenstain Bears. (And since this is often a point of debate, that really is the correct spelling. I promise.) I grew up with those books, and in fact have those same books to read to my son now.
In general, they're excellent books. They teach good life lessons without being overly preachy and contrived, they're very readable and re-readable, and they'll also completely deflate the amount of money we'll have to wind up giving my son for things like lost teeth, since he won't be expecting more than a shiny new dime!
I also appreciate that, in general, both Mama and Papa are reasonable, rational, responsible
However, having now read the same fifteen books roughly half-a-hundred times each, some things start to become painfully apparent, and grate just a little more each time.
First off, the "poetry" books are just... no. There's internal rhyme, although not every instance, and the meter is occasionally a little bit bizarre. And what's even more jarring is that things will be flowing along just fine, and then you'll suddenly come across one of these things that completely breaks the flow as you crash to a halt trying to find a way to make it work with the rhythm of the rest of the book.
I get why they're doing it; kids love rhythmic and rhyming things, and they're much easier to remember. They're often pretty fun to read, too. (I absolutely love reading Dr. Seuss.) I just... sometimes close is worse than not at all, y'know?
Second, let's talk about the internal structure of the treehouse. I can overlook the fact that Shakespeare's a dead white guy, I mean, that the leafy part of the tree obviously contains significant internal solid structures, because I can at least pretend that the walls are simply hidden by leaves. (We rarely see the treehouse in winter, so there's not much evidence to contradict this.) However, even with that generous dispensation, there's simply no getting around the fact that the treehouse has to be a TARDIS.
Just as an example, consider the first floor of the treehouse. It's made very clear in several books that the front steps lead directly into the living room/dining room/kitchen area, and that those rooms are all on the same floor. However, simply scaling from the front door, we see that the diameter of the tree trunk at that point can't be more than about 10 feet!
The same thing goes for the upper floors (and there has to be two floors above the main floor, given the scale). We're never explicitly shown (as far as I know; I haven't read all of the books) where the bathroom(s) is/are in relationship to the rest of the house, so we can write those off as being on a distinct floor between the first floor and the top floor. However, that still leaves the fact that Brother and Sister's room and Mama and Papa's room are absolutely on the same floor; in fact, some books show them literally adjoining, with no door in the frame connecting the two rooms. I'm sort of horrified by the idea of this floor plan.
And while I'm not aware that we ever really see the inside for Mama and Papa's room, Brother and Sister's room alone should take up the entire upper floor, if not more than that. They have a big room, although the configuration does change periodically. But I suppose it's easy to move furniture around when your floor is roughly the size of an Olympic pool.
And that leads me into my third and final critique, which is that continuity in these books is terrible.
I am amused that this book series clearly had a reboot. There was a drastic change in the art style at some point, and there are even significant differences in the early stories. Since it pleases me to think of the Berenstain Bears as a comic book, this doesn't particularly bother me. Reboots happen.
However, even just focusing on the "new" version, there are gigantic, glaring inconsistencies from book to book.
Does the treehouse have a fence? Does it have a standalone garage and a driveway? Does Papa have a workshop in the garage or do they park their car in there? These sorts of details change not only from book to book, but also sometimes within an individual book! Seriously, the garage, driveway, fence, even walking paths will appear and disappear at random within a book.
Or how about their neighborhood? What exactly does their neighborhood consist of, aside from a strange weather anomaly that only seems to occur down that dirt road and in Philadelphia? Is it a forest? A bog? A residential neighborhood? A baseball field? Farmer Ben's farm? How about ALL of those things! (Also, Farmer Ben's farm changes sides of the treehouse as well as being located well down a highway on what appears to be the far side of Bear Country, which is surprisingly walkable, given the terrain.)
I mean, I get that they want to focus on what's relevant to the story, but dangit, I demand some consistent world building!
What makes this sort of lack of continuity strange is that there are plenty of other instances where they've had no problem with continuity between stories. Many of the characters are the same, and even look the same book to book. (Although can someone please clarify for me whose parents Grizzly Gramps and Gran are? Either there's conflicting info in the books, or Mama has a way better relationship with her in-laws than Papa has with his own parents.) There are even occasionally references to previous stories, although not many. These books make liberal use of the reset button, which does make sense.
So the Berenstains are clearly well-aware of the concept of continuity. They just don't, y'know, bother with it. And that makes me twitchy.
However, I have a theory. Given a TARDIS house, I see no reason for all of these stories to be sequential. Instead, every story occurs in an alternate dimension or timeline. That would perfectly explain things! Scenarios where some details are the same and some are different is a staple of this sort of time travel story.
Who knew the Berenstain Bears were sci-fi?
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