The Tale of Ginger and Pickles

by Beatrix Potter

My daughter brought The Tale of Ginger and Pickles home from her school library. It's one Beatrix Potter she didn't recognize, as we have quite a collection at home but not this one. I do have a fat bound volume of the entire works of Beatrix Potter (all the way from the familiar Peter Rabbit through other animal stories and some poetry/nursery rhymes as well) but I've always found the small single-story volumes that you can practically hold in the palm of your hand so charming, I almost like reading them in that format better.

Well, Ginger and Pickles is a little story about a dog and cat who keep shop in a village. They give unlimited credit, and so get lots and lots of customers, but needless to say their business is doing poorly. I had to explain to my daughter what credit meant, and she paid attention to the fact that creatures kept coming to buy stuff, but no one ever paid for it! So of course when it came time to pay for rent, and licences they were in trouble, and things kept getting worse. Eventually they went hungry and resorted to eating their own goods, then had to abandon the shop. The next proprietor wasn't so foolish as to allow credit all the time!

Besides prompting a conversation about bad business models, the book made me explain quite a bit of British language to my daughter as well. Told her that galoshes are rainboots, pounds are similar to dollars, shillings are coins and biscuits more like cookies than bread, among other things.

Rating: 3/5 ........ 60 pages, 1909