PRINCESS PERSEPHONE LOSES THE CASTLE

Loans, interest, and debt all get their day in the sun in this tale of a princess hornswoggled by a smooth-talking siding salesman.

Princess Persephone is distraught by the drafts in her father’s castle. When Aluminum Jim offers to sell and install tin siding on her home, she leaps at the chance. He even offers her a loan with a 50-page contract. Ignoring the sensible objections of Spice the dragon, Persephone signs without reading the contract. Unsurprisingly, after a sloppy installation job, her first bill comes due, and she discovers that she owes more than she can pay. Before you know it, she’s lost her castle entirely. Written by a former FDIC chair, the book valiantly attempts to simplify the concept of predatory lending and its risks but gets in over its head. The urge to teach children to “Beware the Trickster Lender” (as the backmatter further elucidates) is a noble one, but much of the text will remain obscure to young readers despite its expression in rhyming couplets (“With interest compounded annually, / The loan, it balloons exponentially”). Most baffling is the complete absence of a glossary at the end of the book. Should a child reader manage to engage with the material and wish to learn more, they’ll be hard-pressed to define such terms as lien or default—rightly identified as “mystery words”—or even contract. Bair’s Billy the Borrowing Blue-Footed Booby, illustrated by Amy Zhing, publishes simultaneously and addresses consumer debt in abab stanzas.

Predatory lending may someday yield great works of children’s literature, but that day is not today.