Mrs. Piggle Wiggle Books In Order

Publication Order of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle Books

The “Mrs. Piggle Wiggle” series is a set of children’s fiction novels by bestselling children’s fiction author Betty MacDonald. The author was born in Boulder Colorado but spent much of her childhood and young adulthood in Capitol Hill in Seattle before ultimately moving to Roosevelt with her family in 1922.
As a teenager, Macdonald went to Roosevelt high school and only three years later, she would get married to Rober tEugne Heskett. Her new family would then live near Port Townsend, where her husband had found a house at a chicken farm.

MacDonald divorced her husband in 1931 and moved to Seattle, where she took different jobs to support her children and herself given that she had ceased contact with Heskett following their divorce. A major event during this time was when she got Tuberculosis and spent eleven months recuperating at a hospital.
She would take her writing name from her second husband Donald C MacDonald whom she married in 1942. The two made their home in Vashon Island which is the place from which she wrote most of her works. They would eventually move to California’s Carmel Valley in 1956.

MacDonald made her name with the “Egg and I” which was the very first novel she wrote. The novel would subsequently become a bestseller and be translated into more than 20 languages. She based much of it on her experiences living in Chimacumn Valley, where she ran a chicken farm.

It was in the debut that she got to introduce her most popular characters in Ma and Pa Kettle. They were so popular that a few years after she started writing, production companies came calling asking to turn the series into films.

Claudette Colbert played MacDonald in the 1947 adaptation. Fred MacMurray played her husband since studio executives felt it was not proper to publicize her divorce.

While the novel “Egg and I” was a critically acclaimed work that enjoyed massive popularity, it was criticised in some quarters for the stereotypical characterization of Native Americans. A fun thing about it was that it made people believe that the US capital was full of country bumpkins such as Ma and Pa Kettle.

The “Mrs. Piggle Wiggle” series of novels by Betty MacDonald follows the life and times of a woman who lives in a lively suburban area where most of the children have bad habits. In her upside down house, she has a box full of magical cures that her deceased husband who was once a pirate of renown had left to her.

At the start of the series, she provides these cures to parents who want to cure their children of some terrible habits. The magical cures she provides range from the fantastic to the mundane.

In one instance, she blows special powder on a kid which makes them mute for a time so that they stop interrupting their parents when they talk. In another instance, she makes it so that a child continues to clutter his room until he cannot escape from the room.

Mrs. Piggle Wiggle eventually sells her house and moves to a farm where she trains children on good habits using work on the farm with an assortment of animals to instil virtues. But she would eventually return to the city and continue with her magical cures over the rest of the series.

The author has said that most of her stories in the series were inspired by the bedtime stories she would often come up with for her grandchildren, nieces, nephews and daughters. This perhaps explains why Mrs. Piggle Wiggle is sometimes portrayed as an expert in child psychology and in other instances as just as a good fairy/witch.

“Mrs. Piggle Wiggle,” the first of the “Mrs. Piggle Wiggle” series of novels, is a cute little novel that introduces the clever and kind Mrs. Piggle Wiggle.
The novels are set in the Donna Reed period, when most mothers would stay at home to make pot roasts and ginger bread for their children even as the fathers left home for the office and came home with the paper which they would read while having their dinner. The fashion was for the boys to wear sweaters and ironed jeans while the little girls would be resplendent in their white dresses and socks.

Even though these are quite old novels, a lot of the problems that the parents in the stories ask Mrs Piggle Wiggle to help them with are very similar to what a contemporary woman will have to deal with.

The modern child has the same selfishness, constant bickering, cluttering and picky eating. Regardless of their age, these novels are still good fun for anyone that used to enjoy them back in the day.

“Mrs Piggle Wiggle’s Magic” is the second novel of the Mrs Piggle Wiggle series of novels by Betty MacDonald. The novel continues to follow the life and times of an energetic but eccentric woman that helps parents cure the bad habits in their kids.

Most parents will usually ask for her assistance for children that are tattle tales, interrupters, those that deliberately mishear or pretend not to hear, and anti schoolers among several other troubled children.

Betty comically exaggerates the misdeeds of the kids as one kid’s father says he loves her and would keep her around for years but he cannot afford it as she breaks things all the time. The man goes as far as multiplying the number of years she would stay with him with an estimate of how many cups she would break in that time.

Using her magical cures, Mrs Piggle Wiggle does her best to cure the kids of the many faults most of which resolve a few days after.

The third novel of the Mrs Piggle Wiggle series of novels by Betty MacDonald is “Mrs Piggle Wiggle’s Farm.” The novel comes with five beautiful stories that develop the families and individual characters into distinct and interesting personalities.

The author spends a lot of time developing each character including the many kids who do frustrating things as she asserts that they are not bad kids but just lack life experience.

In this novel, the eccentric old widow makes no use of voodoo psychology or magic potions, instead helping the children learn personal responsibility by spending time at the farm. They are put in charge of taking care of animals and ensuring that their welfare is taken care of which helps them develop into responsible children.

Mrs Piggle Wiggle is very effective at making things happen even if there is some manipulation going on. For instance, she locks one of the kids outside the hose to show her how bad it is to be hungry and forgotten.