Nanny Piggins and the Runaway Lion

R. A. Spratt's Nanny Piggins and the Runaway Lion is a very silly story for 8 year olds about a flying pig who works as a nanny for ten cents an hour.

What happens

Nanny Piggins used to be blasted out of a cannon at the circus. She now looks after Derrick, Samantha and Michael, and their father would much rather she didn't.

Mr Green is the joke that keeps giving. He's a tax lawyer who once spent four hours straightening and re-bending paperclips, then billed the time to a short-sighted widow. He speaks to his own children mainly to tell them to go away.

In the first chapter he signs all three up as exchange students to Nicaragua for six months, purely so he can have the house to himself.

So Nanny Piggins thwarts him. That's the shape of the whole book. Something outrageous happens, and a pig in a hot-pink wrestling leotard sorts it out.

The chapters work as separate adventures, which makes this a lovely one to read a bit at a time. One night it's a Belgian exchange student who follows Mr Green around taking notes on his ear wax. Another night it's a Neighbourhood Watch patrol, a gramophone horn used as a nose horn, and a citizen's arrest performed by catapulting yourself off a tree branch. A runaway lion escapes into the neighbourhood too, and Boris has the feeling he's seen that lion before.

Boris is her brother. He's a ten-foot dancing bear who hides under the dining table whenever anyone walks in (nobody ever notices him).

Reading it is like being let in on a joke the grown-ups are missing. Nanny Piggins says something completely unreasonable in an entirely reasonable voice, and then a bracket turns up and makes it funnier.

Your reader will probably love how much of this is the children quietly siding with a pig against their own dad. Nobody is frightened of Mr Green. They just think he's ridiculous.

Is any of it upsetting? Not really. The word bacon is treated as the worst insult in the world, and that's about as dark as it gets.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, You're a Bad Man, Mr Gum! is in the library too. It's the same gleeful nonsense, with a horrible old man who hates children, animals and corn on the cob, and an angry fairy who lives in his bathtub.