Karla

About:
Jemima Puddle-duck is a classic tale written by renowned author Beatrix Potter. Born in Kensington, England in 1866, Potter is an author, illustrator, conservationist and natural scientist. She is know best for her imaginative children's story books featuring common animals. Potter had always loved animals and had kept many of them as pets. She had taught herself how to draw, painting and sketching her pets for many hours. She published 23 books altogether but still many more sketches and concepts of other books remain in her many, highly sought-after sketchbooks. All of her books were published in mini-formats, so as to allow small children to hold and read them comfortably. Her first book was "The Tale of Peter Rabbit", a household name in today's society but was at first shot down by the six publishers Potter had asked to publish her book. "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" is believed to be the first picture book published for children. Her other works include "The Tale of Jeremy Fisher" and "The Tale of Benjamin Bunny". Potter had stated that her favourite out of all her published books is "The Tailor of Gloucester".

Jemima Puddle-duck:
Beatrix Potter published Jemima's tale in 1908. She had wrote it at Hill Top, a working farm that she had bought three years previously. It was her first book to be completely situated in her farm. Jemima, Kep the collie who saved her, and the farmer's wife were modelled after real life individuals on her farm. The situations in the book were very typical of English farm life.

The story is reminiscent of "Red Riding Hood" and Potter says that it is a slight "spin-off". The original version is more like the Perrault's tragic "Red Riding Hood" with Jemima losing her eggs to her rescuers who in fact ate them instead of taking them back, undamaged. She later published a painting book which had her eggs broken but not eaten on the way home. This showed Potter's willingness to exploit commercial possibilities with her books. She "advertised" her other published works on the inside cover of her books and sketched possible merchandise models.

Potter's illustrations are classical and very smooth and refined. it does not distract the reader from the story but gives the reader visual cues to better assimilate the tale with the characters. The detailed illustrations yield a very vivid picture of a typical English woodland and allows the descriptive narrative as well as the readers' imagination to fill in the gaps. It also reveals a different perspective from the text with a picture of the fox smirking deviously as he ushered the unsuspecting Jemima into a woodshed.

Beatric Potter's books are unique in the sense that she does not try to coddle and hide children from the cruelty of the natural world. There is violence and death in all of her works. The main mistakes that Jemima had made in the story was first making the bad decision of running away and then being charmed by the suave fox who wanted nothing more than to eat her for dinner. In this children who read the story can learn to at least think before going off on their own or with a stranger. However in the original, the moral of the story is slightly more meaningful. When Jemima was rescued, the two foxhound puppies that Kep had taken with him had eaten her eggs before Kep could stop them. Kep, fairly indifferent to the tragedy, then escorted the tearful Jemima back to the farm. She had laid more eggs but only four of them had hatched because 'she had always been a bad sitter'. Perhaps the lesson is to see the good beyond the bitter. The farmer's wife had only the best interest of Jemima at heart by giving her eggs to the hens to hatch. Sometimes adults do things that wed don't like, but most of the time they have a good reason.

Why Jemima Puddle-duck?
I chose this picture book for a number of reasons. Most important is the fact that it is such a precious tale and that I will never tire of retelling the story to others.
 * 1) It is a book that I thoroughly enjoyed reading as a child
 * 2) It is a well recognised book
 * 3) it is simple to read and explain
 * 4) it has many special memories associated with it