A review by pagesofpins
Nurse Matilda: The Collected Tales by Christianna Brand, Edward Ardizzone

1.0

I read the Nurse Matilda books one morning because I was curious how they related to the movie Nanny McPhee. I expected something similar to Mary Poppins or the American Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. The first book does have at least a little overarching plot--Nurse Matilda comes to work for them, grows gradually less ugly as the children learn to change their behavior bit by bit, and then has to leave when they grow to love her. The children (of which there are an unknown number) have very inventive ways of being naughty that would probably make children today laugh, but many of which are so over the top as to be obnoxious. Every adult is idiotic and can easily be made to believe that a horse wearing a pink hat is one of the little girls, or that children eating jam are really cannibals, etc. There is quite a lot of language that will be lost on today's children (on today's adults, even), a few politcally incorrect references to "Red Indians", and the second two books mostly involve the children forgetting the lessons they learned, pulling very similar schenanigans, and Nurse Matilda changing from pretty to ugly seemingly every fifteen minutes.

Young children would probably still enjoy many of these silly stories as a read-aloud, but as an adult they quickly grow tiresome and repetitive. A good plot idea, execution could have been better.