My family and I recently finished Roald Dahl’s Matilda, a book that is now one of my favorite read-aloud. I had never read the story before, but I decided it would be a good one to experience as a family. And I was right.
Matilda is the story of a very smart little girl who lives with neglectful parents. She learns to take care of herself and falls quickly in love with reading books. When she goes to school, she’s very advanced for her years because of all her reading (a great message to kids, of course). Then she learns that she can make things happen with her mind.
My boys laughed out loud, guessed what was going to happen, and cheered Matilda on during her battles against her parents and the mean school principal, Miss Trunchbull. And when we were finished laughing, gusting, and cheering, we watched the movie, which all my boys agreed was not as good as the book.
Here are three things I enjoyed most about Matilda:
- The humor. My boys couldn’t stop laughing during my read-aloud sessions, because Matilda would do things that got the better of everyone who was mean to her.
- The personality. Dahl wrote Matilda with such personality, a narrator that was sometimes invisible and sometimes very present. During the times the narrator was very present, it was almost as though the narrator and the reader were in a conspiracy together.
- The empowerment. Many times Dahl referred to Matilda as very small, but throughout the story she did great, amazing things, which underlined what I believe was Dahl’s main them: even small children can make a large mark in the world.
What I love most about Dahl is that all the love he has for children went into his books. You have only to read him to know how much he enjoyed crafting the kind of stories children would love.
Take this opening from Matilda:
“It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
“Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius.
“Well, there is nothing very wrong with all this. It’s the way of the world. It is only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their own revolting offspring, that we start shouting, “Bring us a basin! We’re going to be sick!”
“School teachers suffer a good deal from having to listen to this sort of twaddle from proud parents, but they usually get their own back when the time comes to write the end-of-term reports. If I were a teacher I would cook up some real scorchers for the children of doting parents. “Your son Maximilian,” I would write, “is a total wash-out. I hope you have a family business you can push him into when he leaves school because he sure as heck won’t get a job anywhere else.” Or if I were feeling lyrical that day, I might write, “It is a curious truth that grasshoppers have their hearing-organs in the sides of the abdomen. Your daughter Vanessa, judging by what she’s learnt this term, has no hearing-organs at all.”
He goes on to say:
“It is bad enough when parents treat ordinary children as though they were scabs and bunions, but it becomes somehow a lot worse when the child in question is extra-ordinary, and by that I mean sensitive and brilliant. Matilda was both of these things, but above all she was so quick to learn that her ability should have been obvious even to the most half-witted of parents. But Mr. And Mrs. Wormwood were both so gormless and so wrapped up in their own silly little lives that they failed to notice anything unusual about their daughter. To tell the truth, I doubt they would have noticed had she crawled into the house with a broken leg.”
And so the story begins.
It’s clear to see why Matilda continues to be a favorite with children today.
*The above is an affiliate link. I only recommend books that I personally enjoy. I actually don’t even talk about the books I don’t enjoy, because I’d rather forget I ever wasted time reading them. But if you’re ever curious whether I’ve read a book and whether I liked or disliked it, don’t hesitate to ask.
