Beatrix Potter – Illustrated Collection

The Beatrix Potter Illustrated Collection gathers her animal stories together for 5 year olds, and it opens with the rabbit who went straight into the garden he'd been told to keep out of.

What happens

Peter Rabbit is first, and he's still the best argument for the whole set. His mother goes off to the baker's with a basket and an umbrella. His sisters go and pick blackberries like good little bunnies. Peter squeezes under the gate.

He eats lettuces. He eats French beans. He eats radishes, feels a bit sick, and goes looking for parsley, which is when he meets Mr McGregor.

What follows is properly tense. He loses both shoes. He gets caught by the buttons on his jacket. He hides in a watering can that turns out to have water in it, and then he sneezes.

The sentences are longer and older than most things written for fives now, and that's part of what they're for. Potter never swaps a good word for an easy one. Peter goes lippity-lippity, not very fast. The hoe goes scr-r-ritch, scratch, scratch, scritch. Your reader will not know every word and will not mind, because the sound does the work.

Squirrel Nutkin comes next and it's a different flavour altogether. Nutkin is an absolute pest, singing riddles at an old owl who wants nothing more than a quiet doze, while his brother and cousins stay politely on the right side of him.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

These animals live in a world where animals get eaten, said plainly and early. Peter's father ended up in a pie (that isn't a spoiler, it's in the second paragraph and it's the reason Peter is told to stay out). The squirrels bring the owl an offering of three fat mice, and then a mole. Nothing is gory and nothing lingers, but it's matter-of-fact in a way modern picture books rarely are, and a child who worries about animals may want to talk about it.

For most children the trade is well worth it. The two at the front are short enough for one sitting each, and both turn on a small animal doing the thing it was told not to.

What to read next

If your reader takes to short old-fashioned stories about one child's small world, Further Doings of Milly-Molly-Mandy would suit them next. She lives in a thatched cottage in a village, and a whole chapter can be about a doll's tea set arriving in a cardboard box.