This book is not appropriate for children who are too young to separate fantasy from fact. It contains images of danger and death and the main character, Jemima, is portrayed as inept and stupid. I realize that millions of kids have enjoyed this book over the years, but my child will have to wait until she's old enough to understand these concepts and not be frightened by them.

This story is about a duck named Jemima Puddle-Duck and she isn't able to hatch her own eggs because the farmers wife wouldn't let her. Where ever Jemima was she would get caught and her eggs were taken away. Then one day Jemima Puddle-Duck went looking for a place to hatch her eggs. She saw a forest down a hill and started to run for it. She flew down and saw a stump that would be nice to site on but a gentleman was sitting on it reading a newspaper. So Jemima started to quack and he looked at her. He thought she was lost and asked her if she was but really Jemima wasn't. She told him she was looking for a place to hatch her eggs, so he took her back to his house where he has a place full of feathers that would be nice. Jemima kept going to his house and one day she decided to stay there until they were hatched. The gentleman told her he was going to cook an omlette for her so he told her to go get some supplies. She did and saw a friend and told him the hole story and one day he went to see her at the gentlemans house. What happened at the end of the book? Read "The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck" to find out.
I liked this book because I liked the surprise ending and the illustrations. K.V

I always had Beatrix Potter down as an avatar of Home Counties tweeness, with her anti-modern paeans to the countryside and de liddle cuddly animals. So the unsentimental brutalities of this story came as a welcome shock. 'Jemima Puddle-Duck' is as endearingly hopeless as her name suggests, unable to tend her eggs in the overcrowded barn she shares with some supercilious hens. She flies over the forest in search of a suitably solitary spot, and comes across a helpful gentleman dressed in tweed, reading 'The Sporting Times'. He is a fox, and invites her to make use of his summer residence, in particular the shed carpeted with the feathers of previous victims. Dazzled by his good breeding, Jemima accepts his offer and visits daily. When the eggs are about to hatch, Foxy suggests she bring along various goodies so they can have a charming goodbye party...

The unremitting violence in this story does not emanate from where you'd expect, and this clear-eyed vision of the natural order of things, of brute force vs. cunning, takes place in the most idyllic setting yuou can think of, a richly detailed rural England, its hills and plants alive and painted in the most soothing colours. But even this balmy backdrop plays out a cycle of struggle for domination, with spiders eating flies, and various other creatures being horrid to one another.

Written at the turn of the 20th century, just before female emancipation, it's hard not to see the woebegotten Jemima as an image of women's fate in a world run by men, both good and bad, with the fox as parisitic aristo in straitened circumstances, and the dog as paternalistic liberal. Indeed, the whole thing plays like an Emile Zola potboiler disguised as toddler fodder. Upsetting, cruel and marvellous.