Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is a widow who lives in an upside-down house. Her husband was a pirate, and she has magical cures for the bad habits of the children who live in her neighborhood. Sometimes, she doesn’t need magic for a particular child’s bad habit, just using psychology. Sometimes, certain behaviors, like staying up all night instead of going to bed, are their own punishment, and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle advises the parents to let the children do them for a certain period of time so they can find out for themselves why these things are a bad idea. The first book particularly uses more psychology than magic. In one book of the series, she moves to a farm, but most of the books take place in the same neighborhood, where she lives in the upside-down house.

When I was a kid, I thought that the upside-down house was the best part of the stories. When people walk around inside it, they have to step over the sills of the doorways because what should be the tops of doors are not flush with the ceiling the way the bottoms are flush with the floor, and these doorways are upside down. Also, because the ceilings are now the floors, the chandelier is on the floor of the living room, shining upward instead of down, and kids sit around it like it’s a camp fire.

The books are not single stories. They are collections of short stories about different children.

The series is by Betty MacDonald, but the final book was finished by her daughter, Anne MacDonald Canham, and published after her death. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Bruce Whatley illustrated three picture books containing the text from individual short stories from Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books that had already been written and published. Later, Betty MacDonald’s great-granddaughter, Annie Parnell, wrote a follow-up series about Missy Piggle-Wiggle with Ann M. Martin.

Books in the Series:

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (1947)

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Magic (1949)

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Farm (1954)

Hello, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (1957)

Happy Birthday, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (2007)

Picture Books

Illustrated by Bruce Whatley and containing text from original stories by Betty MacDonald.

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Won’t-Take-a-Bath Cure (1997)

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Cry-Baby Cure (1999)

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Bad Table-Manners Cure (2001)

Missy Piggle-Wiggle

These books were written by Ann M. Martin and Annie Parnell. In these books, Missy Piggle-Wiggle is Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s great-niece, and she’s in charge of the upside-down house and the magical cures while Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle goes in search of her husband, who is missing, not dead. These books are also collections of short stories, not just single stories, although some of the short stories are connected to each other.

Missy Piggle-Wiggle and the Whatever Cure (2016)

Missy Piggle-Wiggle and the Won’t-Walk-the-Dog Cure (2017)

Missy Piggle-Wiggle and the Sticky-Fingers Cure (2018)