Oh, Abigail!

Abigail #1

by Moira Miller, Doreen Caldwell (Illustrator)

Abigail can be naughty, but she's always fun, and every day is an adventure - from buying "bouncing boots" to the horrors of her favourite toy going into the washing machine.

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Moira Miller (1941-1990) was a Scottish children's author. She was born in Clydebank near Glasgow in January 1941 and grew up in the seaside town of Ayr. Moving to Glasgow, an administrative job with the BBC led to her having short stories broadcast on radio which she then expanded to create her first books. Over the next decade she had a successful and prolific publishing career while visiting schools and libraries throughout Scotland spreading her passion for reading and story telling to a new generation. She died in a road accident in April 1990; her stories did not.

Reviews

[Abigail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 1981, this first of three story collections about the eponymous Abigail follows its main character through her everyday and not-so-everyday experiences. The ten episodes here chronicle everything from Abigail on a trip to the garden centre, to Abigail visiting the zoo with the entire family. In a particularly lovely episode, Abigail visits a "grown-up" church for the first time. The cover image shows Abigail after she has been collecting in the neighborhood for a jumble sale...

I discovered these fairly obscure but quite charming books while investigating the work of British author Moira Miller, whose Scottish stories about Hamish and Mirren were of interest to me, a few years back. Naturally, being an Abigail myself, I decided to track them down. I would estimate that Abigail is around five or six. She doesn't seem to be in school yet, but is old enough to be left unsupervised at various points. There is an innocence to these stories, particularly evident in the way Abigail is trusted to wander around the neighborhood by herself, that I have a hard time imagining in books today. Recommended to anyone looking for beginning chapter-books featuring children and their everyday lives and experiences.

[A.E. Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't emphasise enough how much I loved this book when I was little. It's fascinating, in a sense, because there weren't any other books I knew of about Abigails, and this Abigail was nothing at all like me, being long-haired and Northern and frankly quite annoying, whereas I was pixie-cut, from London, and a perpetual joy and delight (obviously). But I loved reading about her, and I thought even then that it was extremely well-written, amusing and entertaining, and the stories weren't too stressful and didn't try and teach anything much, and they weren't about anything much more than tidying one's bedroom or going to the jumble sale. So it's nice to come back and find that not only do I still weirdly know all the words and images to them all, but that the stories are genuinely and delightfully well-crafted. Yay!