This book by Beatrix Potter (available free online from that link, albeit with only one illustration) is, pardon my French, really fucking odd. I'd read it to the same kid I read this to, only he didn't really enjoy this one as much, because it's a lot longer - and as much as we Brits all have deep-rooted cultural memories of how much we love Peter Rabbit I started to wonder reading this whether this is just a subconscious myth of denial, because either those books must be far better than this one or Beatrix Potter was just not a very good children's writer (especially compared to A. A. Milne or Jacqueline Wilson or Anthony Horowitz or Julia Donaldson), or maybe she properly hit her stride with Peter Rabbit and Pigling Bland was left to rot on the dump of Things That Didn't Make It - frankly, I spent the first ten minutes of the reading increasingly wondering whether it was in fact some kind of spoof akin to the Ladybird ones, and genuinely had to apologise to my three-year-old audience to check the publishing info page to realise it was a legit Beatrix Potter - but whatever the case, I found it quite entertaining as it was just so bizarre, with enormous gaping holes in every aspect of its narrative (which, if it could be said to be comprehensible at all, was of utterly no consequence) and new characters on every page and an overarching narrative that started nowhere, traversed through nowhere, and seemed then to conclude nowhere, with a giant bunch of nonsense spouted by anthropomorphic pigs in between.
Probably one to skip.
Probably one to skip.
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