The Tale of Applebeck Orchard

This series is one of several that is starting to get on my nerves because of a literary device gone wrong. Eavesdropping on the lives of people and animals around Beatrix Potter is a cute device ... for a while. I enjoyed the genteel, unobtrusive narrator/eavesdropper of the first few books. This b......more

Reading this series is very like sitting down with a bag of Reese's miniatures. One knows they are far too sweet and shouldn't all be eaten at once, and yet, I simply can't help myself. Annoying narrator and anthropomorphized animals notwithstanding, the stories and animals and scenery and human cha......more

Some really nice characters flanked by some rather mediocre storytelling... the moments with Beatrix and her thoughts are lovely, but the narrator is constantly stepping out of the story to say things like, "I know we view things differently in the 21st century but this is how the Victorians felt."......more

Still delicious story-telling. The author reaches through "the fourth wall" to engage the reader in judgments about the characters more than in previous books, and while this might be confusing to a reader who starts reading the series in the middle, for those of us who've been sitting at the author......more

I really loved the Cottage Tales when I first began reading them. This book and the one before features a narrator that is much more vocal and "present" than in the previous novels, and I don't care for that that much. There are phrases like, "Let's follow them, shall we? We do want to hear what the......more