Oh. my. goodness.

Nanny Piggins is the best nanny ever. How would you like to have a nanny who bakes ginormous chocolate cakes and insists upon sharing them with you, watches soap operas and reads trashy romance novels, encourages children to roll in the mud, and generally breaks all the responsible adult nanny rules and allows her charges to do the same. Well, if you’re a parent, Nanny Piggins might not be your first choice to care for your children. But if you’re a kid, Nanny Piggins is going to be the unrivaled Star Super Nanny of all time.

Just compare her with another fictional nanny.

Nanny Piggins versus Mary Poppins
Mary Poppins: “The newcomer had shiny black hair — ‘Rather like a wooden Dutch doll,’ whispered Jane. And she was thin, with large feet and hands, and small, rather peering blue-eyes.”
Nanny Piggins: “The world’s most glamorous flying pig.”

Mary Poppins: “Michael suddenly discovered that you could not look at Mary Poppins and disobey her.”
Nanny Piggins: “Nanny Piggins had no interest in obedience.” “She barely knew what the word obedience meant. And when she found out, she thought it was utterly unimportant. If she ever caught Derrick, Samantha, and Michael doing exactly what she said, she would tell them off for not using their imaginations.”

Mary Poppins: “I shouldn’t wonder if you didn’t wonder much too much!”
Nanny Piggins: “Telling Nanny Piggins she could not do something was always the best way to make sure that was exactly what she did.”

Mary Poppins: “There was something strange and extraordinary about her — something that was frightening and at the same time most exciting.”
Nanny Piggins: “Who could not fall in love with a nanny whose only job qualifications were her astonishing ability to be fired out of a cannon and her tremendous talent for making chocolate cake, sometimes both at the same time?”

So, Mary Poppins is magical and and extraordinary all that kind of thing, and she gives out a “spoonful of sugar” along with medicine (in the movie), but Nanny Piggins gives out huge slices of cake and chocolate bars and lots of other sticky, gooey stuff every day. Movie Mary Poppins teaches her charges to tidy up the nursery while she sings a magical clean-up song. Nanny Piggins orders five tons of mud to be deposited in the garden for her and the children to play in.

No contest. Nanny Piggins wins, hands down. Actually, she does enter the Westminster Nanny Show in chapter eleven, and I will let you guess who wins that contest. Or you could read Nanny Piggins and the Wicked Plan. (That’s a sneaky, N.P. way of getting you to read the book without telling you to read it. Because I figure you might be about as fond of obedience and being told what to do as Nanny Piggins.)