![the witches roald dahl book pictures the witches roald dahl book pictures](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71Bbi-tg-mL.jpg)
![the witches roald dahl book pictures the witches roald dahl book pictures](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/1fIAAOSwLfNen1m-/s-l400.jpg)
Perhaps she is smiling at the absurdity of such a suggestion. 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. Here's a favourite bit of mine, this one from the beginning:įor all you know, a witch might be living next door to you right now. Not so in The Witches, and I love it for that.īut enough about the ending. How do I say this without giving too much away? In most books in which a child goes through the experience this young boy goes through, the situation is reversed at the end of the story. He completely breaks the pattern, but that’s Roald Dahl for you. This is why I both was and wasn’t surprised with how things turned out in The Witches. And nobody, horrid or nice, is safe from anything at all. You feel that anything, good or bad, is possible in his books. This, however, is not the case with Dahl. The rest is a question of details-and of course, details do matter. That doesn’t mean their stories are bad, or even predictable, but from the very beginning you manage to more or less guess their shapes and their limits. You know that there are things that would never happen to their characters. Some authors-and this includes authors I love-always feel safe. I feel this as an adult, and I’m willing to bet it's something children feel too. He’s wild, surprising, unlikely and slightly macabre, and that makes his books very satisfying on an emotional level. He’s not afraid to go there, wherever “there” might be. One of the many, many things I love about Roald Dahl is the fact that his stories are not tame. There are thrills and chills and humour and transformations, and there’s what I thought was a very original ending. There are witches: bald, toeless witches who want to rid the world of children. There’s the boy's wonderful and loving cigar-smoking Norwegian grandmother. There is – typical Dahl – a tragedy early in the book. How much do I tell you about the plot of The Witches? I would guess that most of you have read it already, but if, like me, you have managed to live a The Witches-less existence for so long, how much do you need to know? I will tell you this: there is an unnamed young boy, and he’s our narrator.