reviewed

Loved Mrs. Piggle Wiggle when I was a kid! She is ever so much better than Mary Poppins and you can't pay me enough to read nanny mcphee. ( )

An old favorite stands up extremely well, but another entry in the Piggle Wiggle series fails utterly. I can remember reading Mrs. Piggle Wiggle with great joy as a very young reader. And when I revisited her in the original volume, all the reasons for that joy came flooding back to me; her upside-down house; her dear departed pirate husband; her quirky costumes; her endless sugar cookies; her enthusiasm for all children's games even when they totally disrupted her home and garden; her wisdom and ingenuity in solving common parenting problems such as "won't pick up toys", "refuses to take a bath" and "never wants to go to bed". The whole book is clever and delightful. In Mrs. Piggle Wiggle's Magic, however, all the cleverness seems to have been used up; we still have parents calling on Mrs. PW to "cure" their children of unwanted habits, but in nearly every case this involves some magic powder blown up their noses or sprinkled in their beds, not the inspired solutions of the first book when radish seeds, graduated sets of dishes and a terribly rude Parrot save the day.
january 2016 ( )

Parents in one city turn to Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle for ludicrous child rearing tips and Saw style punishments to correct various behaviors. More a series of macabre short stories than a novel, really. ( )

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