The Witches by Roald Dahl Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $0.94 You Save: $6.05 (87%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.11 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Witches
Book Review: My Favorite Middle Grade Book of All Time
Summary: 5 Stars
it's my favorite middle grade book of all time, so we can dispense with the review and get straight to craft. I don't think any children's book ever had a greater beginning than The Witches, so I've decided to reproduce the first page and a half in its entirety:
A Note About Witches
In fairy-tales, witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks, and they ride on broomsticks.
But this is not a fairy-tale. This is about REAL WITCHES.
The most important thing you should know about REAL WITCHES is this. Listen very carefully. Never forget what is coming next.
REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ORDINARY JOBS.
That is why they are so hard to catch.
A REAL WITCH hates children with a red-hot sizzling hatred that is more sizzling and red-hot than any hatred you could possibly imagine.
A REAL WITCH spends all her time plotting to get rid of the children in her particular territory. Her passion is to do away with them, one by one. It is all she thinks about the whole day long. Even if she is working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman or driving round in a fancy car (and she could be doing any of these things), her mind will always be plotting and scheming and churning and burning and whizzing and phizzing with murderous bloodthirsty thoughts.
"Which child," she says to herself all day long, "exactly which child shall I choose for my next squelching?"
A REAL WITCH gets the same pleasure from squelching a child as you get from eating a plateful of strawberries and thick cream.
She reckons on doing away with one child a week. Anything less than that and she becomes grumpy.
One child a week is fifty-two a year. Squish them and squiggle them and make them disappear...
...She might even--and this will make you jump--she might even be your lovely school-teacher who is reading these words to you at this very moment. Look carefully at that teacher. Perhaps she is smiling at the absurdity of such a suggestion. Don't let that put you off. It could be part of her cleverness.
I am not, of course, telling you for one second that your teacher actually is a witch. All I am saying is that she might be one. It is most unlikely. But--and here comes the big "but"--it it not impossible.
Wow, right? Just wow. I don't know of a child whose attention this wouldn't grab. Most young children have not consciously been introduced to conspiracy theories. They're still learning the way the world officially works--aren't we all--let alone how some would claim it works in secret. And yet, children are lied to on a regular basis and at some point they begin to pick up on it.
For those children, here is Roald Dahl, an adult willing to say things, metaphorically, it's true, that reveal the world as it is within the relatively safe context of a story. Children are told that adults are nice, that public officials are just and have their best interest at heart (some do), and that they are safe. Adults tell children this because we wish it were true and we reason that they'll have plenty of time to worry over the truth in adulthood.
But Dahl says that there are adults, who appear in many ways just like other adults, who want to harm and even murder children. And to be fair, there are. But lest we become morbid, let us focus on harm. I had a grade school teacher who routinely separated children by class. The children from wealthy families who this teacher wanted to associate with were put into special programs and given preferential treatment. The children, like me, who were not, were made to know their place in society from an early age. This was a woman who meant to harm children, but who received several teaching awards and appeared a normal adult to other adults. My father-in-law could tell you stories about the way his White teachers treated him in Mississippi in the 1960s that would make Dahl's witches seem harmless by comparison.
In every generation, there are these adults who are bad, and often other adults cannot see it. So long as there are children and adults, there will be this problem, and so The Witches is likely to stay relevant forever. Fortunately, Dahl gives us some clues as to how we can spot them:
"...a REAL WITCH is certain always to be wearing gloves when you meet her...
"...Because she doesn't have finger-nails. Instead of finger-nails, she was thin curvy claws, like a cat, and she wears the gloves to hide them."
"A REAL WITCH always wears a wig to hide her baldness. She wears a first-class wig. And it is impossible to tell a really first-class wig from ordinary hair unless you give it a pull to see if it comes off... you can't go round pulling at the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens."
"Witches have slightly larger nose-holes than ordinary people. The rim of each nose-hole is pink and curvy, like the rim of a certain kind of sea-shell... A REAL WITCH has the most amazing powers of smell.. An absolutely clean child give off the most ghastly stench to a witch... The dirtier you are, the less you smell."
"Look carefully at the eyes, because the eyes of a REAL WITCH are different from yours and mine. Look in the middle of each eye where there is normally a little black dot. If she is a witch, the black dot will keep changing colour, and you will see fire and you will see ice dancing right in the very centre of the coloured dot. It will send shivers running all over your skin."
"Witches never have toes... They have just feet... The feet have square ends with no toes on them at all."
"Their spit is blue."
To this day, I do not trust a woman in gloves. I check to see if she has a wig or if her spit is blue or if she has difficulty walking due to a lack of toes. Next week, I'll return to short reviews, but as this is my only post this week and my favorite book, we're going to go a little long.
The main character in The Witches, who is also our narrator, is never given a name--a trick that would certainly not work in every book, but is fantastic here. He is a young boy whose parents die--of course they do, this is Roald Dahl and the man just had no patience for parents--and is sent to live with his Grandmamma, a plump old bird who smokes cigars (inspired):
"Would you like a puff on my cigar?" she said.
"I'm only seven, Grandmamma."
"I don't care what age you are," she said. "You'll never catch a cold if you smoke cigars."
Grandmamma is a witch expert and tells our hero all he needs to know to spot witches and comforts him after a near witch attack. And then the story takes a seemingly unrelated turn. The two are looking forward to a vacation in Norway when Grandmamma contracts pneumonia, so they have to settle for a more subdued trip to Hotel Magnificent. It is imperative to the plot that our protagonists travel there, but why doesn't Dahl just have them head there in the first place? Wouldn't that save time? Perhaps, but Dahl is a master, as I've said, and he is focused on two things: character development and misdirection.
We feel for this nameless boy who has lost his parents and now might lose his Grandmamma as well. But more important is the misdirection. Roger Ebert once said in a review of The Exorcist that the reason that film is so scary is that it does not want to be a horror movie, meaning that the characters were so well rounded and so focused on their individual lives that even if the scary stuff never came in, they could still have a fascinating story on their own. The detective in The Exorcist was also the basis for Columbo, and he was interesting for season after season without a single possession case to investigate.
Horror doesn't work when the characters are nothing more than monster bait waiting around with no purpose except to be menaced at the appropriate time. In order to be effective, a writer must interest us in and compel us to care for their characters and their situation before the monsters come. We care about Grandmamma and her ward and their journey to The Hotel Magnificent is interesting on its own without need of any witches. They get into a scuffle with the hotel manager and the boy trains white mice for a future circus and it is interesting. Just when we would be content to read a story about a boy and his Grandmamma and their travels with a mouse circus, just when things are interesting enough and the reader is comfortable and enjoying a nice story, that is when Dahl and his monsters attack.
While our hero is training his mice at the back of a ball room, hidden lest he be discovered with mice by management, the room fills up with a meeting for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Our hero is unable to get out and so must sit through their meeting. And all of those in the meeting are women. Women wearing gloves and hats with slightly irregular nostrils. And do those women eventually smell our hero at the back of the room? I won't say, but I must tell you that this sequence is the most scared I have ever been when reading a book as it was my first real brush with true horror.
And that's where we'll leave it. If you're looking for a scary book to read this Halloween, this is the one for you. If you're just looking for a great book for anytime, this is the one for you. I have one more point to make, but I'm going to finish the review here as I have to spoil the book to make it.
And now, my last point, which is filled with spoilers. If you haven't read The Witches, stop reading now. Seriously. I'm going to ruin it. Okay, I warned you. My most frequent complaint with horror fiction for kids as a kid was that much of it was condescending. The monsters weren't really scary, they were just lonely. Or the vampire bunny sucked the juice out of veggies instead of people (I love that book, but it isn't scary). No one in those books every really got hurt, and so whatever the monster, it was an empty threat. And even as a child, I knew people did sometimes get hurt and to say otherwise was a lie. Not so with Dahl. He told a great truth within the lie of fiction.
The children in this story do get hurt and hurt bad. Several are murdered--in fantastical ways, sure, but still. One boy is drowned by his own father (again, under fantastical circumstances, but still). If I hadn't already talked for so long, we'd explore that event more in depth, but I believe it is one of Dahl's sharpest critiques of parenting. And finally, the protagonist does not come away unscathed. If you've seen the movie version where he gets made into a real boy again, well, that's Hollywood. But Dahl's tale ends with him accepting his impending death within a few years. Harsh, but, but, BUT, true.
This is the point that will forever divide readers, I suppose. Some adults will think including these elements in a children's story to be reprehensible. If I read the book for the first time now, I might even agree with them. But when I read this book as a child it endeared Dahl to me forever. Here was a writer brave enough to write the truth and I hung to his every word thereafter because adults lie, but I knew I could trust him.
Book Review: Not Dahl's best
Summary: 2 Stars
Unlike some of the other reviewers who have given this book a low rating, I'm not going to complain about the appropriateness of this book for children. The fact is that most children are much tougher-minded than we necessarily would like to believe. Many, if not most, children I've known have a somewhat twisted sense of humor, and nevertheless have grown up into compassionate and rational adults. Children are far more discerning than most of us give them credit for. The highly sensitive or imaginative children who may find this book a bit too scary aren't likely to pick up a book about witches anyway. My one precaution would be that this is NOT a book for children too young or immature to know the difference between fantasy and reality - but any child whose vocabulary, reading level, and attention span are equal to tacking this novel is almost certainly advanced enough to handle it.
I can't say I didn't enjoy "The Witches" at all. I did. But it failed to captivate and delight me as some of Dahl's other children's books have done. I very much enjoyed "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," and "Matilda" is one of my all-time favorites. "The Witches," however, was just a little too silly for my tastes. I expect more wit and cleverness from Dahl. The premise is intriguing, and the beginning is fun to read, but once the actual witches made an appearance in the story, I found it increasingly difficult to suspend my disbelief. The conflict is fairly predictable, and the story itself is drawn out far longer than it needs to be; the novel could easily be trimmed by about 50 to 75 pages without losing anything important.
Of course, the target audience for this novel may well appreciate its silliness, but even as a child I believe I would have felt let down by this one. It's not a bad book by any means, but if you really want to appreciate Roald Dahl's trademark twisted wit, pick up "Charlie" or "Matilda" instead.
Book Review: Several others have already told you
Summary: 5 Stars
What some PEOPLE do not seem to understand this is a FANTASY book. Its not saying real witches are like this. I went through and read all the 1 star comments and felt like I was going to be sick. I guess these men and women do not understand a book to be FANTASY. "Oh its so horrible it gives a wrong depiction on witches" Yada Yada Yada. Get over yourselves.... ITS A FICTION BOOK!!!!Book Review: The Real Witches
Summary: 5 Stars
The title of the book is "The Witches." The author is Roald Dahl. The reason I like this book is because this book has action in it. This takes place in a hotel. The main theme is the grandmother and the boy Luke trying to destroy all the Grand High Witches. I hope you enjoy this book!Book Review: The Witches
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an excellent book for 3rd grade readers. It is very exciting and keeps my child interested. I recommend this book.