For fans of: Rita Mae Brown

“Well. I can see by the look on your face that you have already come to a conclusion. So I recommend to you that, if you have decided there are no dragons, you should put in a bookmark, close the book, and go and make yourself a cup of tea. If you change your mind, you can always come back later.” – Susan Wittig Albert, The Tale of Oat Cake Crag, page 44

It’s 1912, and Beatrix Potter (yes, that Beatrix Potter) has finally managed to escape the hustle and bustle of London and the demands of her aging parents to enjoy some quiet time at her beloved Hill Top Farm. Her vacation is disrupted, however, when "a beastly fly-swimming spluttering aeroplane" begins conducting noisy test flights up and down the local lake and sends the residents of Near Sawrey – human and animal alike – into an uproar. When one of the offending hydroplane’s principal backers is found unconscious and bleeding at the bottom of Oat Cake Crag, Potter and her secret fiancé, solicitor Will Heelis, must use their sleuthing skills to determine if he fell – or was pushed.

If you’re looking for a fast-paced read full of murder, mayhem, and intrigue, this book is not for you. Rife with talking badgers, census-taking dragons, scholarly owls, chaste romances, and small-town gossip, The Tale of Oat Cake Crag is a meandering, family-friendly tale that’s heavy on the cozy and light on the mystery. (In fact, for the first third of the book, the only puzzle that needs solving is the identity of the person sending nasty notes to the vicar’s bride-to-be).

Albert’s prose is beautiful, and she writes omniscient third-party narration with incredible skill. I usually find this method of storytelling too intrusive, but it works here, successfully evoking the sense memory of being read to as a small child. While her animal characters could easily have come across as childish or two-dimensional, I found them charming and well-developed; in fact, I mostly liked them better than their human counterparts. Overall, however, I found The Tale of Oat Cake Crag to be lacking in urgency and narrative drive. The book jumps from plotline to plotline with almost dizzying frequency and contains so many characters that the story ends up feeling cluttered, and Albert so often refers back to her previous installments (The Tale of Oat Cake Crag is the seventh in Albert’s The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter series), the uninitiated are likely to end up lost, bored, or both.

In sum, this Peter Rabbit/Beatrix Potter origin tale will likely be a tad precious for the average mystery reader, but for those nostalgic for the storybooks of their youth or just looking to settle down with a gentle tale and a cup of tea, Albert’s Cottage Tales might be just the thing. ~ Kat