Delightful kid-lit classic
I recently read Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with my nine-year-old son. Published in 1964, this kid-lit classic is still delightfully entertaining to children of today, even those who haven’t seen the movie. For adults, it is one of the more enjoyable chapter books you can read with elementary school kids. This is my son’s favorite book by Dahl, and I would have to agree with him.
Willy Wonka is the world’s greatest chocolate manufacturer and a reclusive genius who sequesters himself inside his giant factory. What goes on inside this secretive compound is a mystery until Wonka announces a contest in which five lucky winners will get to tour his factory and win a lifetime’s supply of chocolate. After much anticipation, a poor young boy named Charlie Bucket scores a winning ticket. He and his grandfather get to meet Wonka and tour the factory, along with the four other winners and their parents. This is no ordinary factory, however, but a magical fantasy land and candy lover’s paradise.
While Charlie is the hero of the story and an exemplary behavioral model for children to follow, the other four children are various species of juvenile monster. One is a greedy glutton, one is addicted to bubble gum, another is a gun-toting TV junkie, and then there’s the little rich girl who demands her every whim be satisfied. Dahl doesn’t merely heap all his criticism on these problem children, but saves some of his censure for the parents who indulge them. Through these negative caricatures, the book imparts some good moral lessons to young readers in a very fun and non-preachy manner. Wonka’s workforce, a race of foreigners of unknown origin called the Oompa-Loompas, act as the Greek chorus of the production, reinforcing each lesson in silly poetic song.
As good as this book is, I actually do prefer the movie. That is, the 1971 musical starring Gene Wilder (I haven’t seen the Johnny Depp version). Director Mel Stuart and his team really did a wonderful job with the visuals on that film, going well above and beyond Dahl’s descriptions in the book. The screenwriters made some changes to the story, which Dahl hated, but I actually think are an improvement. For example, in the book Charlie is a relentlessly good boy surrounded by brats. In the film Charlie is not perfect, as few children are. He is tempted to make a mistake by breaking Wonka’s rules, but atones for it with a demonstration of his pureness of heart which sets him apart from the poorly behaved kids. Dahl also disagreed with the casting of Gene Wilder as Wonka, but Wilder’s take on the character is really far more interesting than the Wonka depicted in the book. Dahl primarily defines Wonka by the wonderland that surrounds him, while Wilder brought a manic quality and a scary side to the character that really doesn’t come across in the book.
Children’s literature is not a genre that I personally enjoy particularly, but if all kids’ books were as fun as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I might just be converted. For anyone with young kids, it is an essential addition to your youngster’s bookshelf.
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Timeless fun for kids and grown-ups
As the father of two young boys, I’m always looking for chapter books to read with my sons, and whenever possible I try to steer them towards the classics, just for an occasional break from Captain Underpants. I’m not one of those grown-up readers who seeks out kid lit for its own sake, but I did enjoy James and the Giant Peach quite a bit. Originally published in 1961, it was the first children’s novel by British author Roald Dahl.
The story is about a young English boy named James Henry Trotter who lives a dark and dreary existence until a stranger gives him a handful of magic “crocodile tongues.” James accidently spills these little green rice-like objects on the ground under a peach tree, which results in the startling growth of the titular gargantuan fruit. After discovering a hole in the peach, James climbs inside, where he finds and befriends a group of intelligent, man-sized insects. Together they embark on a wacky journey that takes them far from home.
As is often the case with the protagonists of children’s literature, James is an orphan. He is forced to live with his two aunts, who serve the same function as the Evil Stepmother or Wicked Witch in many a fairy tale. This pair of harpies makes James’s life a living hell by heaping upon him verbal and physical abuse. Most children to some extent see themselves as persecuted by authority figures who tell them what to do, so young readers will no doubt enjoy reading about how James liberates himself from these two terrible guardians. Dahl takes the aunts’ ill treatment of James to such an extent, however, that some young readers may even find it scary. Another aspect of the book that may not be suitable for everyone is Dahl’s repeated use of the A-word (synonymous with donkey) to describe a stupid person (If I actually type the word, Amazon’s database will reject this review). Sure, it’s not the worst case of profanity, but probably not something you want to add to your kids’ daily vocabulary either.
There really isn’t much of a lesson to learn from James and the Giant Peach, which makes it even more fun. James makes friends along the way, and they work together to solve problems, so I suppose friendship is a theme, but mostly you just follow along on the bizarre adventure and enjoy it for what it is. There’s no heavy-handed moral that Dahl is pushing. For moms and dads, he satirizes Cold War paranoia in a few scenes, but not nearly to the extent that he does in his 1982 novel The BFG. Mostly, James and the Giant Peach is just a weirdly fun adventure with a lot of delightfully silly humor in it. My sons enjoyed it even more than I did and laughed out loud over quite a few passages. Though neither brief for a children’s book nor particularly dumbed-down in its vocabulary, my second-grade son didn’t have any trouble reading the prose, but I think even kids as old as fourth or fifth grade would still get a kick out of the story.
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Charming but tedious
I’m sure a lot of people grew up with this story and absolutely love it, but having just encountered it for the first time, as an adult reading it to my own kids, I was underwhelmed. The title of Roald Dahl’s 1982 novel The BFG is an acronym for Big Friendly Giant. The heroine of the story, a young girl named Sophie, spies the giant on the prowl in her neighborhood one evening when she is up past her bedtime. The existence of giants is supposed to be a secret, so the BFG snatches Sophie up and takes her back to his cave, where she’s required to stay forever so she can’t tell anyone that he’s real.
Luckily he’s a gentle and friendly giant, unlike others in the book. There are nine other giants who make their secret rounds at night, but instead of blowing dreams into children’s bedrooms they snatch kids up and eat them. If your children are too old to be scared by this premise (as mine are), then they’re probably old enough to be bored by it. The rather gory allusions to bone crunching and blood bottling get rather monotonous when they are dragged out ad nauseam over the course of a too-lengthy novel. The story is simple enough that Dr. Seuss could have made it work in 48 easy pages, but Dahl stretches it out over three or four hours of reading. And this is one of his shorter books? For most of its length, the novel is just long descriptive passages about the giants and their lifestyles, with an emphasis on the threat from the child-eating carnivores. It isn’t until the last few chapters when Sophie and friend decide to do something about it, but even then the resolution feels overly protracted.
Where the novel succeeds is in Dahl’s playful use of language and touches of humor throughout. The BFG speaks in a dialect that combines barbaric crudeness with childlike cuteness. His lingo is peppered with a bevy of nonsense words like whizzpopping, crodsquinkled, and frobscottle, and Dahl incorporates clever puns into the prose, particularly when he’s describing the flavors of “human beans.” Linguistically, the story occasionally had my elementary school boys and I laughing, but narratively, we were mostly bored by the plot and kept wishing Dahl would get on with it already.
If there’s a moral to the story, Dahl doesn’t hammer it home. The BFG proves that scary people/things can be nice—Don’t judge a book by its cover, that sort of thing. Sophie shows that kids can be heroes too. Mostly, however, it’s just a fight-the-monsters tale that takes forever to get around to fighting the monsters. The story does have a certain charm to it, so I can understand why many have fond memories of the book from their youth, but Dahl’s probably got better books up his sleeve than this. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach seem like better candidates for the kid-lit canon.
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