Schoolhouse Review Crew: Kinder Cottage

We love books! And rather firmly believe that there's no such thing as too many books, just too few bookshelves. Well, *I* believe that, dh begs to differ, hee hee. . . So, when we got the chance to choose two of the Peter Rabbit books from Kinder Cottage Publishing, the only decision to make was which two books to get! I chose Peter Rabbit Goes A-Visiting and How Peter Rabbit Went to Sea.

Kinder Cottage Publishing is a small, family owned publisher, you can read about them on their About Us page.

The Peter Rabbit books that Kinder Cottage sells were originally written by Duff Graham over 90 years ago and are in the public domain. Kinder Cottage made some changes to update the language, such as using bicycle instead of velocipede.

The books we received are small, hard cover books, with tons of full color illustrations throughout. These books are ideal for ages 3-9. And are available from Kinder Cottage for $4 each.

As soon as we got them, Lexie and Little Bit settled into a chair to read together! I love that!

They started out reading Peter Rabbit Goes A-Visiting. In this book, Peter Rabbit's mother asks him to go to the doctor to get medicine for his sister, Flopsy's toothache. Mother tells him to come straight back, but instead he ends up going to a party with his cousin, Jack. Interestingly, instead of the typical "and the moral of the story is, go straight home" that I was expecting, he has a wonderful time, gets home, tells his mother about his adventures, and she, and his sisters forgive him all.

The other book that we received was  How Peter Rabbit Went to Sea.  In this story, Peter's mother has told him and his sisters not to play near the brook but, after doing various other things, Peter decides he wants to play "Pirate", builds himself a boat, and sails off. He ends up, quite quickly, making it all the way to the sea where he encounters a shark, whale, crab, etc before a sea gull picks him up and begins to carry him home. When he gets home, before his mother can say anything, he declares he will never play pirate again!

Despite the endings being less "and the moral of the story is" than most books of this era and genre, they are otherwise much the same. At one point, while I was reading one of the books to Little Bit, she declared that she doesn't like them because they're scary because Peter Rabbit always does things he's not supposed to. I think the combination of Little Bit's very empathetic personality (she is generally more upset than her older sisters when one of them has to deal with an unpleasant consequence of their actions), and the fact that punitive discipline and corporal punishment are not how we do things in our house, combines to make the stories not entirely to her liking. Any child who enjoys other books of a similar genre from the early 1900s, would, no doubt, find these books equally enjoyable.

As an added bonus, to the already incredibly reasonable prices, use coupon code TOS to receive a 20% discount off the product price on the Kinder Cottage website!

To see what other members of the Schoolhouse Review Crew thought of these books, and the rest of the Peter Rabbit books from Kinder Cottage, click the banner, below.


All prices and information are accurate at time of posting.