maandag 27 augustus 2012

50 Books Challenge 2012 - # 38: The Witches by Roald Dahl

Title: The Witches
Author: Roald Dahl
Story: A seven-year-old boy has a run-in with some real-life 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. 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. Witches, as our hero learns, hate children. With the help of a friend and his somewhat-magical grandmother, our hero tries to expose the witches before they dispose of him.
Start: august 26th 2012
End: august 27th 2012
Comment: This is the last book I read in my Roald Dahl month. It was such a pleasure reading them all and it's great to end this month with "The Witches". This is without a doubt the scariest book Dahl wrote. I remember that it freaked me out as a kid, both the book and the movie. The little boy in the book hears all those gruesome stories from his grandmother, that he didn't only get scared. He gets curious and wants to see them for real. When he does, he wished he didn't. My favorite parts in the book were the chapter where grandma tells her grandson how you can recognize a witch. And second is where the boy turns into a mouse and tries to think of a plan to get the witches. I really liked the boy narrator. Like in "Danny the Champion of the World" we see the story through his eyes. Grandma is also loveable, although she has the nasty habit of smoking cigars. She dedicades her life to her grandson. The witches in this book aren't stereotypical witches with pointy hats, brooms and a black cat. Dahl managed to create a new kind of witch, maybe even scarier than the one we already knew. This month was fantastic, Roald Dahl will always be te best children's book writer.
Rating: 5/ 5

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