By Emily Jenkins
Two children run a lemonade stand in the sleet, sell every last cup, and still end the day with less money than they started with.
Pauline decides today is the day to open a lemonade stand. It is winter. There is sleet on the ground and almost nobody on the street, and her parents tell her so. She goes anyway, with her little brother John-John trailing after her. She counts out her quarters, spends six dollars on lemons and limes and sugar and cups, and sets up shop selling lemonade, limeade and lemon-limeade at fifty cents a cup. Nobody comes. So they make a sign. They chant. They do cartwheels in the cold to pull a crowd in. They slash the price to twenty-five cents. And it works, they sell out, every cup. Then Pauline counts the money against what she spent at the start, and there are four dollars where six used to be.
Here is the thing almost no money book for this age will do: the children lose. They work hard, they are clever, they market the thing, they cut the price, they sell every cup, and they still come home down two dollars. Jenkins never says the word failure and never wags a finger. Pauline just counts the money out loud, and a five-year-old sitting on your lap can see with their own eyes that six is more than four. That's profit and loss, done in about eleven seconds, with no lecture attached. And the ending is the best part, because the four dollars buys two popsicles and the children are perfectly happy, in the sleet, in winter, eating ice. The business went badly. The day went beautifully. Karas draws the whole thing in cold grays with the stand glowing in the middle of it.