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Common sense media reviewers.

Kid genius gets revenge on mean adults in fun fantasy.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

Children will learn some quick facts (titles, auth

Intelligence can matter more than brutal power, ev

Miss Trunchbull abuses Miss Honey and her students

Miss Trunchbull throws children out of windows, pi

There's a lot of name-calling directed from adults

Parents need to know that Roald Dahl's Matilda is about a brilliant, magical little girl who's miserable at home with her nasty, clueless parents and oppressed at school by her mean headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. However, Matilda finds a loving, kindred spirit in her teacher, Miss Honey, who values her pupil…

Educational Value

Children will learn some quick facts (titles, author names, and some plot summaries) of great books that Matilda reads, including Burnett's The Secret Garden and Dickens' Great Expectations . They'll also learn what times tables are, and how to spell a few words, such as "what" and "difficulty."

Positive Messages

Intelligence can matter more than brutal power, even when power is wielded by a large adult over a small child.

Positive Role Models

Miss Trunchbull abuses Miss Honey and her students, and Matilda's relationship with her parents is one of mutual dislike. However, Miss Honey is a wonderfully warm and encouraging teacher. She's also very brave in her way, and she has the adult perspective to express how adult cruelty affects children. Matilda is a special young hero, avenging adult crimes with her marvelous brainpower. Of course, this is all in the context of Roald Dahl's fantastical imagination, so the physical abuse is cartoonish, and little children can't really do magic, yet there is much to admire in the genius of Matilda Wormwood.

Violence & Scariness

Miss Trunchbull throws children out of windows, picks them up and swings them around by their hair or ears, and locks a child in a tiny room with spikes protruding from the walls. She also has pushed a young girl's head underwater as punishment. Though no one is really injured in this fantastical novel, some sensitive youngsters may be upset by the Trunchbull's cruelty.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

There's a lot of name-calling directed from adults to kids, or between adults, including "stupid," "glob of glue," "ignorant little twit," "gangster," "useless bunch of midgets," and more.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Roald Dahl 's Matilda is about a brilliant, magical little girl who's miserable at home with her nasty, clueless parents and oppressed at school by her mean headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. However, Matilda finds a loving, kindred spirit in her teacher, Miss Honey, who values her pupil's amazing brain power. Miss Trunchbull inflicts mental cruelty and physical abuse on the students, including name-calling, tossing children out of windows, locking them in a closet lined with spiky nails, and spinning them around by their hair or ears. These exaggerated acts of malice are part of the fantasy, though, along with Matilda's magical mental tricks. This novel was made into a dark yet delightful 1996 movie , and it's available as an audiobook read beautifully by actress Kate Winslet .

Where to Read

Community reviews.

• Parents say (19)
• Kids say (77)

Based on 19 parent reviews

Kids are smarter than reviewers are giving them credit for...

Let's read matilda little girl has powers, what's the story.

MATILDA is the story of a little girl genius. By age 4, the title character has read all the books in the children's section of her local library, and moved on to Dickens, Austen, and Hemingway. She can also do advanced math in her head and has a sophisticated understanding of the world. Unfortunately her crooked car-dealer father and bingo-holic mother, TV addicts both, don't appreciate her at all. In fact, they "looked upon Matilda ... as nothing more than a scab." Matilda spends most of her time reading and the rest thinking up clever ways to punish them for their atrocious behavior, such as putting superglue into her father's hat brim, and swapping his hair tonic for peroxide. Things change when Matilda starts school. Crunchem Hall Primary School is run by the horrific Miss Trunchbull, "a gigantic holy terror, a fierce tyrannical monster who frightened the life out of pupils and teachers alike." At the same time, Matilda is taken under the wing of her perfectly sweet teacher, Miss Honey, who needs the little girl as much as the student needs her. Getting back at the Trunchbull will be much more difficult, and dangerous, than punishing her parents, so Matilda's magnificent mind starts developing even more unbelievable talents!

Is It Any Good?

This classic book has been delighting kids and their parents since 1988, appealing both to readers' imaginations and to their sense of justice. The good in Matilda are all good, and the wicked get their comeuppance at the hands of giddy, delighted children. Precocious readers, like Matilda, will recognize in this novel's villainous characters some of the same qualities that define the bad children in what is probably author Roald Dahl's most famous work, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory . Mean characters exhibit gluttony and greed, watch too much television, and cheat to get what they want. Good characters are lovable, smart, and triumphant. Matilda is a wonderful romp -- a great read-aloud for young children, and a mild challenge for middle graders to read themselves. Either way, it's tons of fun and immensely satisfying.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the idea of revenge in Matilda . Is it right for Matilda to play tricks on her parents and Miss Trunchbull?

Do you think any real person can do magical tricks like Matilda does?

If you had Matilda's powers to move things with your mind, how would you use them?

Book Details

• Author : Roald Dahl
• Illustrator : Quentin Blake
• Genre : Fantasy
• Topics : Magic and Fantasy , Friendship , Great Girl Role Models
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Penguin Group
• Publication date : May 8, 2005
• Number of pages : 240
• Last updated : June 10, 2015

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By Roald Dahl

'Matilda' by Roald Dahl tells the tale of a clever young girl tackling bullies in her life with wit, courage, and miracles.

About the Book

Article written by Neesha Thunga K

B.A. in English Literature, and M.A. in English Language and Literature.

‘Matilda’ is the last long children’s book written by Roald Dahl in his lifetime. The book revolves around a precocious young girl named Matilda and the battles she faces against the bullies in her life.

The book was published to near-universal acclaim in 1988 and won the Children’s Book Award soon after. The magical story has captured audiences across the world and has remained a source of delight to readers till today.

Key Facts about Matilda

• Title: ‘Matilda’
• Published: October 1, 1998
• Genre: Children’s Literature, Fantasy Fiction, Humor
• Point-of-View: First-person peripheral narrator
• Setting: A small Buckinghamshire village in England
• Climax: Matilda frightens Miss Trunchbull with her magic powers.
• Antagonist: Miss Trunchbull

Roald Dahl and Matilda

Roald Dahl would tell his children bedtime stories every night. Though he admits that most of them were pretty bad, several of them ended up as acclaimed children’s books . Published in 1988, ‘ Matilda ‘ is Roald Dahl’s long children’s book.

It took almost 2 years for Dahl to complete the novel. Though the writing is simple and to the point, ‘ Matilda was a work of labor.’ Dahl famously rewrote the entire novel because he was unhappy with the first version.

Lucy Dahl, Roald Dahl’s daughter, received a letter from her father in December 1986 about ‘ Matilda .’ In it, Dahl writes,

The reason I haven’t written you for a long time is that I have been giving every moment to getting a new children’s book finished. And now at last I have finished it, and I know jolly well that I am going to have to spend the next three months rewriting the second half. The first half is great, about a small girl who can move things with her eyes and about a terrible headmistress who lifts small children up by their hair and hangs them out of upstairs windows by one ear. But I’ve got now to think of a really decent second half. The present one will all be scrapped. Three months work gone out the window, but that’s the way it is.

In the first version, Matilda was the villain of the story. She was a wicked girl who used her powers for her sadistic pleasure and helped her teacher financially by fixing a horse race. She also died at the end of the novel at the hands of Miss Trunchbull. This version of events was ultimately overturned in the rewriting , and Matilda was made the hero of the story.

After rewriting the story of ‘ Matilda ,’ Dahl admitted that he was finally happy with the book. In an interview with Todd McCormack, he commented, “Now I’m fairly happy with it. I think it’s ok, but it certainly wasn’t before.”

The plot of the novel begins with Matilda Wormwood, a young girl of remarkable maturity, who finds herself neglected by her parents, Mr. and Mrs Wormwood. The little girl learns how to read grown-up books on her own and begins to play tricks on her parents, involving a parrot and her father’s hair dye. Within her school environment, Matilda encounters an exceptional teacher named Miss Honey, who not only identifies her potential but also endeavors to have her placed in an advanced class. Yet, Miss Honey’s efforts are hindered by the imposing figure of her aunt, Miss Trunchbull.

In due course, Matilda becomes aware of her extraordinary ability—telekinesis, the power to move objects with her mind. Simultaneously, she uncovers a profound secret held by Miss Honey, involving Miss Honey’s father (Magnus) and her aunt. Fueled by this newfound knowledge and her unique powers, Matilda embarks on a mission to take action. Much like Dahl’s other children’s stories, Matilda finds a happy ending in Miss Honey’s cottage, and the story teaches children the vital lesson of standing up to bullies.

The idea for ‘ Matilda ‘ was rooted in a deep fear that Roald Dahl nursed in the late 1980s. The fear was about books going out of existence. This was around the same time that televisions were becoming extremely popular, and nearly every house in the United Kingdom had a television set. Thus, Dahl wrote a book about a genius child who loved reading.

‘ Matilda ‘ was written from a small and cozy hut in Roald Dahl’s garden. He called his hut his “nest” and wrote while sitting on his mother’s armchair, with a specially made desktop spread across his lap. Yellow legal notepaper was his go-to writing tool.

Books Related to Matilda

Roald Dahl has a repertoire of children’s literature under his belt, all of which are similar to ‘ Matilda ‘ in various ways. Some of these include ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine,’ ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,’ ‘Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator,’ ‘Revolting Rhymes,’ ‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More,’ ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox,’ ‘The Witches,’ ‘James and the Giant Peach,’ ‘Danny, Champion of the World,’ and ‘The BFG’. 

Some of these novels have connections to ‘ Matilda .’ For instance, the enormous cake that Ms. Trunchbull forces Bruce Bogtrotter (an overweight child in the novel) to eat as punishment for stealing a piece of cake from the kitchen is featured in Roald Dahl’s ‘ Revolting Recipes .’ It is also believed that Bruce Bogtrotter is a more sympathetic version of Augustus Gloop, the glutton from ‘ Charlie and the Chocolate Factory .’

There are also parallels between the short story ‘ The Magic Finger ‘ by Roald Dahl (published in 1964) and ‘ Matilda .’ The protagonist of the short story is a young girl who has magic powers in her finger. The powers get activated when she gets too emotional or feels strongly about a cause. The premise of the short story has led people to believe that it might be a precursor to ‘ Matilda .’

Readers who wish to explore books by other authors similar to ‘ Matilda ‘ can read ‘ Demon Dentist’ by David Walliams, ‘The Worst Witch’ by Jill Murphy, ‘Gangsta Granny’ by David Walliams, ‘ Pippi Longstocking’ by Astrid Lindgren and Tony Ross, ‘ Rose’ by Holly Web, ‘ Charlotte’s Web’ by EB White, ‘Green Eggs and Ham ‘ by Dr. Seuss and ‘Ballet Shoes’ by Noel Streatfeild.

The Lasting Impact of Matilda

‘Matilda’ has been frequently hailed as one of the best children’s books of all time . It is especially renowned for how Matilda stands up to her bullies and fights for the right things and people in her life. As such, the novel has resonated with both children and adults around the world.

In 1996, a film adaptation of the novel was released. Directed by Danny DeVito and starring Mara Wilson, the film received critical acclaim. However, it turned out to be a box office bomb.

A musical version of ‘ Matilda ‘ was produced in the Redgrave Theatre in Farnham in 1990. Adapted by Rony Robinson and with music produced by Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, the musical version toured the UK. A second musical version opened on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre in 2013. The stage version of the novel is massively successful with audiences and has won multiple awards in the United Kingdom and the United States.

In 2012, a set of six stamps were issued by Royal Mail featuring the original illustrations by Quentin Blake in ‘ Matilda.’ The protagonist of the story was featured on the 76p stamp.

An audiobook of the novel has been released, with actress Kate Winslet providing the narration. In 2018, Netflix announced that it would adapt ‘ Matilda ‘ as an animated series along with other books by Roald Dahl.

In October 2018, the original illustrator of ‘ Matilda ‘, Quentin Blake, celebrated 30 years of the publication of the book by imagining what Matilda would be as a grown-up. He drew illustrations of her in various professions, including astrophysics and exploration.

Matilda Review ⭐️

‘Matilda’ by Roald Dahl is one of the most popular children’s books of all time. It tells the story of a highly intriguing 5-year-old protagonist capable of performing miraculous acts.

Matilda Historical Context 📖

‘Matilda’ is one of Roald Dahl’s most popular children’s novels in the contemporary period. It was published in 1988 to great critical acclaim.

Matilda Quotes 💬

Roald Dahl’s ‘Matilda’ is a story about a precocious 5-year-old girl with magical powers, as she takes on the bullies in her life.

Matilda Characters 📖

The characters in Roald Dahl’s ‘Matilda’ are vividly drawn and highly memorable. Each of them has a role to play in Matilda’s overall growth and development. 

Matilda Themes and Analysis 📖

‘Matilda’ by Roald Dahl is jam-packed with intriguing themes which range from exploring the power of books to righteousness and bravery.

Matilda Summary 📖

‘Matilda’ is a children’s book by Roald Dahl. It revolves around the story of a 5-year-old girl with advanced intellect and magical powers.

It'll change your perspective on books forever.

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Matilda by Roald Dahl - review

‘The best bit was when Matilda used her mind to knock over the water jug with the newt in it and it frightened Miss Trunchbull!’

This story has lots of great characters such as Miss Honey who is Matilda’s teacher, Matilda’s awful Mum and Dad and Miss Trunchbull, who is headmistress at Matilda’s school and hates children.

Matilda has magic powers, which make the book funny except when she uses them at school and Miss Trunchbull tries to put her in the Chokey. Miss Honey is my favourite character in the book because she is so kind and tries to make the lessons fun for the children.

I really liked the story because it was so good and easy to read. The best bit was when Matilda used her mind to knock over the water jug with the newt in it and it frightened Miss Trunchbull!

I would recommend this book to any reader over 8 years because you can get into the story straight away.

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Matilda by Roald Dahl – Book Review

Matilda is the world’s most famous bookworm, no thanks to her ghastly parents.

Her father thinks she’s a little scab. Her mother spends all afternoon playing bingo.

And her headmistress, Miss Trunchbull?

She’s the worst of all.

She’s a big bully, who thinks all her pupils are rotten and locks them in the dreaded Chokey.

Despite these beastly grownups trying to push her down, Matilda is an extraordinary girl with a magical mind.

And she’s had enough.

So all the terrible adults had better watch out, because she’s going to teach them a lesson they’ll never forget!

As a child, I was a massive Roald Dahl fan and spent hours with my nose in his books. At school, we had to read his older children’s work on his life, Boy and Going Solo. However, over the years I have noticed that I never actually read a few of his work, namely Danny the Champion of the World, The Witches, and Matilda.

This wasn’t something I really thought about recently until I saw it on Sarah Cox’s book show as one of the guests ‘Bring Your Own Book’ and she made it sound so appealing that I ordered it right away and then read it in a day. Why, oh why, did I ever leave it so long.

The book is for any bookworms no matter your age, it is a book about a bookish child. A child who loves all the classics. It is also a book about nasty people and how through being very clever from reading this little five-and-a-half-year-old Matilda gets her revenge.

The book is truly amazing. It was a beautiful, fun, energetic read and I fell in love with the little girl and want to spare her from these brutes that call themselves adults, including her parents who dislike their own child.

The copy I bought was the 30th-anniversary copy, mainly as I love a hardback book and partly because I loved the cover and the colour – yes I am that easily pleased.

Within the book is artwork by Quentin Blake who illustrated I think all of Roald Dahl’s work. He has a way with his artwork that not only brings the story to life but makes you laugh and connect with the characters too.

Part of me is glad that I never this book as a child as I got to appreciate it as an adult and part of me thinks I missed out on such a fabulous book that would have made me constantly giggle and frown.

Overall, this is a book that still after all these years works in today’s society. It was great fun to read and this edition would make a wonderful gift too.

Book Reviewer – Stacey

Purchase online from:, amazon.co.uk – amazon.com – amazon.in – apple books – blackwells – bookshop.org – waterstones, about the author.

The son of Norwegian parents, Roald Dahl was born in Wales in 1916 and educated at Repton. He was a fighter pilot for the RAF during World War Two, and it was while writing about his experiences during this time that he started his career as an author.

His fabulously popular children’s books are read by children all over the world. Some of his better-known works include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr Fox, Matilda, The Witches, and The BFG.

He died in November 1990.

What did you think of Matilda? Share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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5 Responses

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I read this back when I was a kid. Great book.

Such a good book! I love the movie too.

I watched the movie, never read the book.

I love this curious child and this author – I love your thoughtful review

definitely one of my fav authors and books!!

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Review and Summary of Matilda by Roald Dahl

Introduction:.

“Matilda” is a classic children’s book written by Roald Dahl, one of the most celebrated and beloved children’s authors of all time. This review aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the book, its themes, and its literary devices, while also exploring its broader impact on readers. The suggested reading age for “Matilda” is 8 years and older.

Book Summary:

“Matilda” tells the story of a young girl named Matilda Wormwood, who is exceptionally intelligent and has a love for reading. Despite her extraordinary abilities, Matilda faces a challenging life, as her parents and the cruel headmistress of her school, Miss Trunchbull, fail to recognize her potential. The book follows Matilda’s journey as she uses her wit and newfound telekinetic powers to overcome adversity and protect her kind-hearted teacher, Miss Honey. Important themes in the book include the power of knowledge, courage, and justice.

The strengths of “Matilda” lie in its memorable characters, engaging plot, and the use of wit and humor throughout the story. Roald Dahl’s unique writing style keeps readers engaged, while his use of literary devices such as irony, imagery, and foreshadowing adds depth to the narrative. The book is also notable for its exploration of social issues such as child abuse and the importance of education.

One of the weaknesses of the book is its somewhat unrealistic portrayal of Matilda’s telekinetic powers, which may make it harder for some readers to fully relate to the protagonist. However, this element adds a magical touch to the story that can inspire imagination and creativity in young readers.

In relation to the author’s life, “Matilda” was published in 1988, towards the end of Dahl’s career. It is often considered one of his greatest works, as it showcases his ability to create compelling characters and narratives that resonate with readers of all ages.

Evaluation:

“Matilda” is a must-read for children and adults alike, as it offers valuable lessons on courage, resilience, and the importance of standing up for what is right. Fans of other Roald Dahl books, such as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “James and the Giant Peach,” will undoubtedly enjoy this heartwarming tale. In comparison to other works in the same genre, “Matilda” stands out due to its unique blend of humor, magic, and real-world issues.

Comprehension and Analysis Questions:

• While practicing her reading
• During a confrontation with Miss Trunchbull
• When she becomes angry at her father
• Miss Trunchbull
• Mrs. Phelps
• Mrs. Wormwood
• The power of knowledge
• The importance of friendship
• The consequences of greed
• The value of family

1. c, 2. a, 3. a

• Roald Dahl – Matilda
• Scholastic – Matilda by Roald Dahl

Awards and accolades:

“Matilda” has won numerous awards, including the Children’s Book Award in 1988. It has also become a best-selling book and has been adapted into a successful movie in 1996 and a popular Broadway musical in 2010.

Functional details about the book:

• ISBN: 978-0142410370
• Number of pages: 240
• Publisher: Puffin Books
• First publish date: October 1, 1988
• Adaptations: Movie (1996), Broadway musical (2010)
• Genre: Children’s fiction, fantasy
• BISAC Categories: Juvenile Fiction / Humorous Stories, Juvenile Fiction / Fantasy & Magic
• Suggested Reading Age: 8 years and older

Other Reviews:

• Common Sense Media – 5/5 stars
• Goodreads – 4.33/5 stars

Where to buy the book:

Purchase “Matilda” on Bookshop.org

Is this book part of a series?

No, “Matilda” is a standalone book.

About the author:

Roald Dahl was a British novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter, who is best known for his captivating children’s stories. Born in Wales in 1916, Dahl’s writing career began in the 1940s with works for adults. He gained widespread fame with his children’s books, which often feature dark humor, fantastical elements, and memorable characters. Some of his other best-selling books include “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “James and the Giant Peach,” and “The BFG.” Dahl has won numerous awards throughout his career and is often regarded as one of the greatest children’s authors of all time. He passed away in 1990.

Final Thoughts and Recommendation:

“Matilda” is a timeless story that will appeal to both children and adults due to its engaging characters, magical elements, and important messages about courage, resilience, and the power of knowledge. It is a must-read for fans of Roald Dahl and those who enjoy imaginative and heartwarming tales.

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by Roald Dahl illustrated by Quentin Blake ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1988

After some autobiographical excursions, Dahl here returns to the sort of whimsically grotesque fantasy that makes grown-ups wince and children beg for more. His heroine is five-year-old Matilda, a genius whose mathematical abilities, as well as her impressive reading list (Hemingway, Steinbeck, etc.), are totally unappreciated by her father—a dishonest used-car salesman—and her mother, a devotee of bingo and TV soaps. Only when the girl enters school does she find an understanding ally, Miss Honey, a paragon of virtue who attempts to defend her pupils against unbelievably cruel headmistress Miss Trunchbull, who hates children in direct proportion to their youth and tortures them accordingly. Just when things seem to be at their worst, Matilda discovers still another gift, telekinesis, enabling her to defeat the horrible Trunchbull and give Miss Honey, and herself, a new start. Dahl's tightly woven plots, his strict sense of absolute justice, and his raunchy "funny bits" make him popular with children who also appreciate the empowerment he grants to his smaller, weaker protagonists. Matilda is the most simplistic of his efforts in this direction, but it does retain the time-honored appeal, abetted by Blake's apt illustrations. It probably should be marked "For Children Only," though. And Dahl slips badly when he says that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien have no "funny bits" in their books.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1988

ISBN: 0142410373

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1988

CHILDREN'S SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

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Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.

Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.

Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and  her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).

Pub Date: May 14, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013

CHILDREN'S SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES

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by Soman Chainani ; illustrated by Iacopo Bruno

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SNOW PLACE LIKE HOME

From the diary of an ice princess series.

by Christina Soontornvat ; illustrated by Barbara Szepesi Szucs ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

A jam-packed opener sure to satisfy lovers of the princess genre.

Ice princess Lina must navigate family and school in this early chapter read.

The family picnic is today. This is not a typical gathering, since Lina’s maternal relatives are a royal family of Windtamers who have power over the weather and live in castles floating on clouds. Lina herself is mixed race, with black hair and a tan complexion like her Asian-presenting mother’s; her Groundling father appears to be a white human. While making a grand entrance at the castle of her grandfather, the North Wind, she fails to successfully ride a gust of wind and crashes in front of her entire family. This prompts her stern grandfather to ask that Lina move in with him so he can teach her to control her powers. Desperate to avoid this, Lina and her friend Claudia, who is black, get Lina accepted at the Hilltop Science and Arts Academy. Lina’s parents allow her to go as long as she does lessons with grandpa on Saturdays. However, fitting in at a Groundling school is rough, especially when your powers start freak winter storms! With the story unfurling in diary format, bright-pink–highlighted grayscale illustrations help move the plot along. There are slight gaps in the storytelling and the pacing is occasionally uneven, but Lina is full of spunk and promotes self-acceptance.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-338-35393-8

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Scholastic

Review Posted Online: March 26, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019

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by Sarah Mlynowski & Christina Soontornvat ; illustrated by Maxine Vee

by Christina Soontornvat ; illustrated by Kevin Hong

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The Literary Edit

Review: Matilda – Roald Dahl

When I first decided to work my way through the BBC’s Big Read , I wanted to do a thorough job – thus no half-hearted attempts or unfinished books are permitted. I’m sure that at some point during my childhood I read Matilda, but in the name of being thorough, when placing my most recent order on Amazon, I included Matilda in the line-up.

Without wanting to sound horribly tacky, the first thing that struck me about this book was the similarities between myself and Matilda. I may not have had the ghastly parents, but I did have a love of reading instilled in me from a very young age, much like the protagonist in this novel. Growing up in a small town in Sussex, I remember walking to my local library every Saturday aged seven and stocking up on books for the week; I can still recall the glee I felt when I was told that the borrowing limit had been extended from three books to seven. And while I certainly wasn’t reading Dickens, books absolutely played a big part in my childhood and have continued to do so throughout my adult life.

London’s Evening Standard has recently launched a literacy campaign hoping to ‘get London reading’ on the back of recently published statistics. One in four children under five have a TV in their bedroom, and one in five children leave primary school without being able to read properly. Thus, while this novel was published almost twenty-five years ago, it’s message is as poignant as ever.

The tale is a charming one; Matilda’s parents neither own nor have they read, a single book between them, indeed like much of modern society they spend their time slobbed in front of the TV and have no interest in reading. At school she is befriended by her teacher Miss Honey – the niece of the evil Headmistress Miss Trunchball – who discovers that Matilda has an incredible gift and is far ahead of her years in terms of intelligence.  When Miss Honey tries to notify Matilda’s parents, they remain uninterested, as does Miss Trunchball. And thus forms an unlikely friendship between teacher and pupil, with a very happy ending.

About Matilda

Matilda Wormwood’s father thinks she’s a little scab. Matilda’s mother spends all afternoon playing bingo. And Matilda’s headmistress Miss Trunchbull? Well, she’s the worst of all. She is a big bully, who thinks all her pupils are rotten and locks them in the dreaded Chokey. As for Matilda, she’s an extraordinary little girl with a magical mind – and now she’s had enough. So all these grown-ups had better watch out, because Matilda is going to teach them a lesson they’ll never forget.

About Roald Dahl

The son of Norwegian parents, Roald Dahl was born in Wales in 1916 and educated at Repton. He was a fighter pilot for the RAF during World War Two, and it was while writing about his experiences during this time that he started his career as an author.

His fabulously popular children’s books are read by children all over the world. Some of his better-known works include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr Fox, Matilda, The Witches, and The BFG.

He died in November 1990.

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4 comments on “Review: Matilda – Roald Dahl”

Even though I’m a bloke I completely identified with Matilda. This was something Roald Dahl always did brilliantly. His protagonists were always perfect for the young mind reading the book, a bit like how a horoscope can seem to resonate with you.

Hi – glad to hear it – I totally agree and think that Roald Dahl was fantastic at creating characters that readers could idetify with. Thanks for stopping by on my blog – let me know if you have any reading recommendations!

They just put out stamps dedicated to Roald Dahl books in the UK. They’re amazing. I’m kind of obsessed with his book The BFG.

Wow – they sound fab! The BFG is down on my reading list for next month so I’ll let you know what I think – Fantastic Mr Fox was my fae of his when I was younger 🙂

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Friday 19 March 2010

Review: matilda.

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Book Review

• Fantasy , Humor

Readability Age Range

• Jonathan Cape Ltd. published the book in 1988; this version of the book was published in 2013 by Puffin Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group
• Federation of Children’s Book Groups Award, 1988

Year Published

Matilda by Roald Dahl has been reviewed by Focus on the Family’s marriage and parenting magazine .

Plot Summary

Matilda Wormwood is a brilliant child. At the age of 3, she teaches herself to read using old newspapers and cooking magazines. Her parents, however, pay little attention to her. She also has a brother, but though he is kinder than her parents, the two rarely speak. Her father is a used-car salesman who brags about selling broken-down cars under false pretenses. Matilda’s mother often ignores her and leaves her home alone. One day, while Matilda’s mother is gone, the then 4-year-old walks to the library, looking for a book to read.

The librarian is surprised to see such a small child come in alone, but Matilda is so bright and well mannered that she is allowed to stay. Matilda reads all of the books in the children’s section, and on the librarian’s recommendation, begins reading Dickens, Hemingway, Steinbeck and other well-known authors.

Matilda’s parents do not support her reading habit, repeatedly calling her ignorant and stupid. When Matilda asks to be allowed to eat in her room and read, her father yells at her to eat in front of the TV like the rest of the family. Matilda, frustrated with her father’s constant neglect and verbal abuse, decides to retaliate in a small way every time someone treats her poorly.

Matilda’s first act of revenge is to put superglue around the inside of her father’s favorite hat before he leaves for work. Her father is unable to remove the hat all day and night. Matilda’s mother finally cuts it off with scissors, leaving her father with several bald patches.

About a week later, her father comes home to find Matilda reading in the living room. In a fit of rage, he snatches the library book, rips out its pages and throws it in the wastebasket. In retaliation, Matilda borrows a talking parrot that can say “hello” and “rattle my bones” from a child in her neighborhood, with whom she is a friend. She stuffs the parrot and its cage into the chimney of her house. Her frightened parents hear the voice and think it’s a burglar before concluding the house is haunted.

Her father comes home one day and instructs his son to work out a sum so the boy can begin learning about business and finance. Matilda immediately figures out the answer in her head, but when she tries to tell her father, he yells at her, calling her a liar and cheat. The next morning, Matilda replaces her father’s hair product with her mother’s platinum-blonde hair dye. Matilda’s father, who is very proud of his black hair, is deeply distressed by the new color.

At age 5, Matilda begins school. Her teacher, Miss Honey, immediately recognizes the child’s brilliance and goes to the headmistress to discuss moving Matilda to a higher grade level. Headmistress Trunchbull refuses, having been warned by Matilda’s father that if anything bad happens at school, it is likely caused by Matilda.

Ms. Trunchbull physically and verbally abuses her students, both in her capacity as headmistress and when she teaches classes. But she does so in such outrageous ways that none of the children’s parents believe the stories. Trunchbull grabs one girl by her pigtails and throws her across a field. A little boy who steals a piece of cake is forced to eat an enormous cake so he will get sick.

Trunchbull takes over one class period of each grade in the school every week. When she teaches, she expects there to be a cup and a jug of water on the desk. Matilda’s friend, Lavender, offers to get the water; however, before Trunchbull arrives, Lavender places a newt in the jug. Trunchbull comes in and proceeds to scream insults at and physically abuse students who answer questions incorrectly. She finally pours herself a glass of water, and out comes the newt.

Trunchbull immediately accuses Matilda and threatens to expel her. Matilda, outraged by this false accusation, wishes that the glass would tip over, spilling the newt onto Trunchbull. She stares intently at the glass, and something begins to happen. She is able to push the cup over with her mind. Matilda is shocked. Since she is unable to go to her parents with the information, she confides in Miss Honey.

Miss Honey urges Matilda to be cautious and invites the child to her home so they can discuss Matilda’s unique gift. When Matilda arrives, she is shocked by how bare and small Honey’s home is and begins to ask Honey about her life. As a child, Honey lived in a fine house with her parents. After her mother died, an aunt came to live with Honey and her father. The aunt was abusive, and Honey’s father died under mysterious circumstances.

A presumably fake will was produced that left everything to the aunt. When Honey got a job, the aunt took all of her wages, saying that since raising Honey was expensive, Honey owes her a great deal of money. Honey is left with one pound per week. Through careful planning, Honey was able to move out of her aunt’s house, but one pound per week is barely enough to live on. Honey then reveals that Trunchbull is her aunt.

Matilda formulates a plan to help Honey. She begins to practice using her powers, and once she is strong enough, she sets her plan in motion. When Trunchbull teaches Matilda’s class, Matilda picks up a piece of chalk with her mind and begins to write on the whiteboard. Pretending to be the ghost of Honey’s father, Matilda tells Trunchbull to leave town and give back Honey’s house and wages. Trunchbull faints, and when she awakens, leaves town after giving back Honey’s inheritance and wages.

After Trunchbull leaves, Matilda is moved to a higher grade and her powers stop working. Honey thinks that Matilda’s extraordinary mind needs a challenge. When Matilda was stuck in kindergarten, all of her excess mental energy needed somewhere to go, which resulted in her developing powers. Now that she is being academically challenged, she has less excess mental energy. Matilda is not bothered by the loss of her powers.

Matilda and Honey remain close friends and spend a great deal of time together. One afternoon, Matilda returns home to find her parents frantically packing. They inform her that they are moving to Spain in less than an hour. Distraught, Matilda rushes to Honey’s house. Honey explains that Matilda’s father has been selling stolen cars and is probably on the run from the law. Matilda begs Honey to allow her to stay. Honey agrees that Matilda can live with her, as long as Matilda’s parents agree. They raise no objection, and Matilda and Honey live together quite happily.

Christian Beliefs

Trunchbull is described as walking through a crowd of children like Moses parting the Red Sea. Honey says that if Matilda pushed over the glass with her mind, it would be the greatest miracle performed since the time of Jesus.

Other Belief Systems

Honey warns Matilda to use her powers carefully because they rely on mysterious powers. Honey says that she does not think the powers are evil and that they may be good or divine.

Authority Roles

Matilda’s parents are neglectful and cruel. They often leave Matilda home alone, even as a toddler. They disparage her for reading and verbally abuse her, calling her a twit , cheat , liar , and other insulting words. They are also relatively uneducated and always watch television.

Matilda’s father describes how he cheats his customers by rolling back the mileage on cars’ odometers and putting sawdust in the engines, so that they will run smoothly for about 100 miles before breaking down. He teaches Matilda’s brother about business and finance, but refuses to talk to Matilda about it because she is a girl. He often yells at Matilda.

Matilda’s mother leaves Matilda home alone so she can play bingo. Her mother also says that looks are more important for a girl than education. When Honey talks to Matilda’s parents about her education, they are entirely disinterested and dismissive. When the family moves to Spain, they do not hesitate to leave Matilda with Miss Honey.

Ms. Trunchbull verbally and physically abuses her students. She often punishes students without proof of wrongdoing. It is implied that she beat her niece Honey when they lived together. Trunchbull would push Honey’s head underwater in a bathtub and hold it there. Honey states that Trunchbull cowed and dominated her until she was like a slave. It is suspected that Trunchbull killed her brother-in-law. She also stole Honey’s inheritance and wages. She hates the children at the school and has no real interest in their education.

Honey is kind and caring. She is the only adult, other than the librarian, who cares about Matilda’s well-being and education. After Trunchbull refuses to move Matilda to a higher grade, Honey gives Matilda advanced textbooks to study during class time and instructs her to ask questions at the end of each period.

Though Honey is skeptical about Matilda’s powers at first, she listens and gently asks Matilda if she could knock over the glass again. Honey works hard to support herself and is optimistic despite her difficult situation. She does her best to care for and befriend Matilda, and eventually takes Matilda to live with her.

Profanity & Violence

A– is used once. Heck is used a few times. Oh my gawd appears a few times as well.

Matilda’s parents call each other and their children twit , witch , cheat , liar , ignorant , nasty , freak , wart and stupid . The parents also say “shut up” quite frequently. Trunchbull uses a variety of colorful insults throughout the entirety of the book, such as twerp , foul carbuncle , poisonous pustule , ignorant slug , stupid glob of glue , mangled little wurzel and moth-eaten maggot .

Trunchbull threatens to beat a student’s bottom until she can’t sit down for a month. She also has a tall, narrow cupboard in her office called the Chokey. It has spikes and broken glass all around the sides, and she puts children in it for hours. She throws a student out of a second-floor window for eating candy during a lesson. Trunchbull grabs a girl by her pigtails, swings her around faster and faster, and throws her out of the playground and across the playing fields.

She breaks a large china platter over a student’s head. When a boy answers a math problem incorrectly, Trunchbull holds him aloft by his hair until he says the correct answer. She lifts another student up by his ears, which are said to stretch out significantly. Honey states that she doesn’t believe that her father would have killed himself and implies that Trunchbull murdered him.

Sexual Content

Discussion topics.

Get free discussion questions for this book and others, at FocusOnTheFamily.com/discuss-books .

Additional Comments

You can request a review of a title you can’t find at [email protected] .

Book reviews cover the content, themes and worldviews of fiction books, not their literary merit, and equip parents to decide whether a book is appropriate for their children. The inclusion of a book’s review does not constitute an endorsement by Focus on the Family.

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Home › Book Reviews › Book Review: Matilda by Roald Dahl

Book Review: Matilda by Roald Dahl

By georgelthomas on 22 Sep 2023 • ( 0 )

Hi everyone! I hope you’re all well. It’s Friday, which means it’s time for another review . Today, I am reviewing one of my favourite books: Matilda by Roald Dahl .

Matilda by Roald Dahl was first published in 1988 by Jonathan Cape and is 239 pages long.

The Plot Matilda tells the story of a young, intelligent girl named Matilda who develops telekinetic powers, using them to punish one terrible teacher while helping another.

Characters Matilda Wormwood Matilda is a precocious five-year-old girl with a love for reading and learning that surpasses that of her neglectful parents, who believe children should not waste their time reading. In one instance, her father even tears up one of her library books, causing her to take revenge by setting up some clever practical jokes.

Later, when she attends school (she starts late because her parents forgot to make the appropriate arrangements), she is wrongly blamed for putting a newt in mean headmistress Miss Trunchbull’s water. Matilda gets so mad at being wrongly accused and discovers she has a gift, suddenly finding she can move things with her eyes, tipping over the glass of water and causing the newt to jump on Miss Trunchbull.

With the help of her lovely, kind teacher Miss Honey, Matilda learns to harness her telekinetic powers, deciding to use them to help improve her life.

Miss Honey Miss Honey, Matilda’s school teacher, immediately sees Matilda’s intelligence and compassion and is instrumental in advocating for her. She is a kind-hearted mentor who believes in her students and works to help them achieve their full potential. Miss Honey is a model of kindness, gentleness, and patience and is adored by her students. Throughout the book, she is a ceaseless support to Matilda in learning to harness her telekinetic gift and intelligence, with the two forming a close bond , becoming so close that Miss Honey confides in Matilda about her harsh upbringing.

Miss Trunchbull Miss Trunchbull is the strict headmistress of Matilda’s school (and without giving too much away, a lot more). Miss Trunchbull is a terrifying authoritarian figure with strict rules and a strong dislike for children. She is imposingly tall and muscular, having once been an Olympian, and has a brutal reputation for corporal punishment. Her punishments are often cruel and humiliating, and she is notorious for her explosive temper.

Trunchball takes an immediate dislike to Matilda because she hates intelligent children. As a matter of fact, in her ideal school, there would be no children at all.

Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood Mr. And Mrs. Wormwood are Matilda’s parents and are neglectful, selfish, and unrepentantly ignorant. Their interests lie more in watching TV and engaging in shady car deals than caring for their daughter. They see education as pointless and do not believe in reading or academic achievements. Mr Wormwood hates that Matilda is intelligent and thinks his son to be superior, even though all the evidence points to the opposite. Mrs Wormwood seems to be a little less awful to her daughter, though only slightly. She seems to care more about bingo than her children and tends to agree with her husband on most things, especially regarding their hatred of books.

Lavender Lavender is one of Matilda’s classmates, a mischievous and adventurous girl who becomes Matilda’s good friend, helping her manoeuvre around the harsh school environment. Lavender is the one who puts the newt in Miss Trunchbull’s drinking water in a moment of self-confidence and defiance.

Bruce Bogtrotter Bruce is one of the students at Matilda’s school. At one point, he is accused of stealing a slice of cake from Miss Trunchbull’s tea tray in the kitchen, a crime she sees fit to punish him for in front of the whole school. Gathering all the students together, Miss Trunchbull calls Bruce to the front of the room, where she doles out his infamous punishment: forcing him to eat an entire, giant chocolate cake. It’s clear Trunchbull intends for the boy to be sick or for him to be unable to finish eating the cake – but Bruce defies her expectations and finishes the lot to the sound of every student cheering him on. It’s one of the more memorable scenes in the story.

Writing Style One of the most notable aspects of Dahl’s writing style in general, but especially in Matilda is his use of his descriptions. Here, he paints a clear picture of Matilda’s world; from the oppressive atmosphere of her home to the empty, bare-bones feel of Miss Honey’s cottage, his descriptions are not only rich in detail but also appeal to the senses, making the reader feel as though they are right alongside the characters.

Another thing that shines through is his use of humour. Despite the heavy nature of some themes in the book, some of which are rather dark, such as neglect and mistreatment, and even the suggestion of a suicide at one point, Dahl manages to infuse the story with lightness and whimsy that keeps the tone from becoming too heavy.

Additionally, as with many of Roald Dahl’s books, he expertly captures and conveys the world from the point of view of a child. He writes with empathy and understanding of how children interpret the world around them, including how adults seem so mysterious and inexplicable. This gives the book an authentic and relatable feel, making it all the more enjoyable.

Illustrations The illustrations done by Dahl’s long-time collaborator, Quentin Blake, are an integral part of the reading experience of Roald Dahl’s books, adding depth and dimension to his fantastic stories.

In Matilda, Blake’s illustrations are instantly recognizable, and his drawing style perfectly complements Dahl’s whimsical writing. Every page is filled with his simple yet brilliantly drawn pictures, perfectly capturing the playful and mischievous spirit of the story. Their exaggerated expressions and gestures work particularly well here. From Matilda’s steely determination to Miss Trunchbull’s manic rage, and even the scenes where Matilda glues a hat to her father’s head and then tricks him into dying his hair, the illustrations perfectly portray the emotions of each character, making the story all the more engaging.

Final Thoughts I have read Matilda several times over the years. It has been a great escape from the world for me, and it has also been a go-to to read to my nephews when they were growing up.

Overall, it is a classic story that should be on the reading list of all children (and grown-ups, for that matter). It is a testament to the power of imagination, kindness, and determination and a reminder that hope exists even in the bleakest circumstances.

I am giving Matilda an 8/10.

Have you read Matilda or seen any of its adaptations? What did you think of them?

As ever, thanks for stopping by. It really means the world.

Until next time,

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Home / Book reviews / Matilda: Reprint Edition

Matilda: Reprint Edition

By Roald Dahl, Elin Meek, and and, Quentin Blake

477 reviews

Five-year old Matilda longs for her parents to be good and loving and understanding, but they are none of these things. They are perfectly horrid to her. Matilda invents a game of punishing them each time they treat her badly and she soon discovers she has supernatural powers. A Welsh translation of the award-winning Dahl title, Matilda. — Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru

Matilda had very mean parents who didn't let her read books. She is very clever and has a power to levitate things.

I really loved Matilda because it was funny, but something that was very sad her dad Ted or her library books and centre into school with someone called the principal, was mean, cruel and bad

I liked Matildas’ magical power (telikinisis, can’t spell it) (moving)

Matilda vs Miss Trunchbull.

I loved this book because I like Roald Dahl.

This book is a fiction.I like matilda the best because she is kind,helpful and also brave. I like Roald Dahl books because it because it makes me want to read all of the collections. I would give this to all the people who loves Roald Dahl interesting books.

It's interesting me because of Miss Trunchbull and what she was going to do to the children

I liked when Matilda wrote on the chalkboard with her eyes!

I love this book so much . Roald Dahl is such a great author . The story was so thrilling to read and it draws you into it . Matilda is such a great character and I love her story it encourages you to come out of your shell and express your emotions .

this book had a cruel and interesting storyline which ended peacefully. I definitely recommend this book.

my best and favourite character is Matilda because she smart and reads a lot of books. this is a fiction book. I would recommend this book to people who love to read books.

Matilda & Miss Honey were my favourite.

Love her love of reading.Such a fun tale!

This was my favourite

I love this book because it’s a girl called Matilda who lives with horrible parents and she decides to play tricks on them. The funniest bit is when Matilda puts glue on her dads hat and it gets stuck to his head.

I like Matilda as she is so clever and goes to the library instead of watchinging tv. I like her eyes that shoot out invisible hands.

I love Matilda but the book was so long. Mummy took forever

Matilda taught me a valuable life lesson that with books come brains. Her message was that even if our troubles get above us, we should never quit and we should fight for what we believed in, no matter what!

I liked every single bit

Matilda was amazingly smart , and on the other hand, her parents cheat their way out of everything and are so dumb . I just find that hilarious .

I would recommend this book to anyone who believes in never giving up and never losing hope.

I enjoyed reading this book except in the middle it got a bit boring but it got fun near the end again

I like this book my favourite part was when Matilda was born, and when she went to school and had her first day as it made me remember my first day

I love this book and the story, Matilda is my favorite because I love books too.

I like Matilda my favourite part is when Miss Trunchbull leaves, she was horrible.

The book was talking about a family had unexpected child.They did not treat her like another kid.She defence herself until family brought her to mean school.Whole story is very interesting to read.

this book is so funny and my favourite person is matilda.

My favourite bit was where miss trounchbull waw being mean to the children, but Matilda got her revenge on her! It was fiction.

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Matilda Paperback – Illustrated, August 16, 2007

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 240 pages
• Language English
• Grade level 3 - 7
• Lexile measure 840L
• Dimensions 7.24 x 5.42 x 0.63 inches
• Publisher Penguin Young Readers Group
• Publication date August 16, 2007
• ISBN-10 0142410373
• ISBN-13 978-0142410370
• See all details

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About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

The Trunchbull let out a yell. . .

The Trunchbull lifted the water-jug and poured some water into her glass. And suddenly, with the water, out came the long slimy newt straight into the glass, plop!

The Trunchbull let out a yell and leapt off her chair as though a firecracker had gone off underneath her.

She stared at the creature twisting and wriggling in the glass. The fires of fury and hatred were smouldering in the Trunchbull’s small black eyes.

“Matilda!” she barked. “Stand up!”

“Who, me?” Matilda said. “What have I done?”

“Stand up, you disgusting little cockroach! You filthy little maggot! You are a vile, repellent, malicious little brute!” The Trunchbull was shouting. “You are not fit to be in this school! You ought to be behind bars, that’s where you ought to be! I shall have the prefects chase you down the corridor and out of the front-door with hockey-sticks!”

The Trunchbull was in such a rage that her face had taken on a boiled colour and little flecks of froth were gathering at the corners of her mouth. But Matilda was also beginning to see red. She had had absolutely nothing to do with the beastly creature in the glass. By golly, she thought, that rotten Trunchbull isn’t going to pin this one on me!

Puffin Books by Roald Dahl

Boy: Tales of Childhood

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

Danny the Champion of the World

Dirty Beasts

The Enormous Crocodile

Fantastic Mr. Fox

George’s Marvelous Medicine

The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me

James and the Giant Peach

The Magic Finger

The Minpins

Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes

The Vicar of Nibbleswicke

The Witches

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More

Roald   Dahl

illustrated by Quentin Blake

PUFFIN BOOKS

For Michael and Lucy

The Reader of Books

Mr Wormwood, the Great Car Dealer

The Hat and the Superglue

The Platinum-Blond Man

The Trunchbull

The Parents

Throwing the Hammer

Bruce Bogtrotter and the Cake

The Weekly Test

The First Miracle

The Second Miracle

Miss Honey’s Cottage

Miss Honey’s Story

The Practice

The Third Miracle

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.”

I might even delve deeper into natural history and say, “The periodical cicada spends six years as a grub underground, and no more than six days as a free creature of sunlight and air. Your son Wilfred has spent six years as a grub in this school and we are still waiting for him to emerge from the chrysalis.” A particularly poisonous little girl might sting me into saying, “Fiona has the same glacial beauty as an iceberg, but unlike the iceberg she has absolutely nothing below the surface.” I think I might enjoy writing end-of-term reports for the stinkers in my class. But enough of that. We have to get on.

Occasionally one comes across parents who take the opposite line, who show no interest at all in their children, and these of course are far worse than the doting ones. Mr and Mrs Wormwood were two such parents. They had a son called Michael and a daughter called Matilda, and the parents looked upon Matilda in particular as nothing more than a scab. A scab is something you have to put up with until the time comes when you can pick it off and flick it away. Mr and Mrs Wormwood looked forward enormously to the time when they could pick their little daughter off and flick her away, preferably into the next county or even further than that.

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 brilliant. Her mind was so nimble and 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.

Matilda’s brother Michael was a perfectly normal boy, but the sister, as I said, was something to make your eyes pop. By the age of one and a half her speech was perfect and she knew as many words as most grown-ups. The parents, instead of applauding her, called her a noisy chatterbox and told her sharply that small girls should be seen and not heard.

By the time she was three , Matilda had taught herself to read by studying newspapers and magazines that lay around the house. At the age of four , she could read fast and well and she naturally began hankering after books. The only book in the whole of this enlightened household was something called Easy Cooking belonging to her mother, and when she had read this from cover to cover and had learnt all the recipes by heart, she decided she wanted something more interesting.

“Daddy,” she said, “do you think you could buy me a book?”

“A book ?” he said. “What d’you want a flaming book for?”

“To read, Daddy.”

“What’s wrong with the telly, for heaven’s sake? We’ve got a lovely telly with a twelve-inch screen and now you come asking for a book! You’re getting spoiled, my girl!”

Nearly every weekday afternoon Matilda was left alone in the house. Her brother (five years older than her) went to school. Her father went to work and her mother went out playing bingo in a town eight miles away. Mrs Wormwood was hooked on bingo and played it five afternoons a week. On the afternoon of the day when her father had refused to buy her a book, Matilda set out all by herself to walk to the public library in the village. When she arrived, she introduced herself to the librarian, Mrs Phelps. She asked if she might sit awhile and read a book. Mrs Phelps, slightly taken aback at the arrival of such a tiny girl unaccompanied by a parent, nevertheless told her she was very welcome.

“Where are the children’s books please?” Matilda asked.

“They’re over there on those lower shelves,” Mrs Phelps told her. “Would you like me to help you find a nice one with lots of pictures in it?”

“No, thank you,” Matilda said. “I’m sure I can manage.”

From then on, every afternoon, as soon as her mother had left for bingo, Matilda would toddle down to the library. The walk took only ten minutes and this allowed her two glorious hours sitting quietly by herself in a cosy corner devouring one book after another. When she had read every single children’s book in the place, she started wandering round in search of something else.

Mrs Phelps, who had been watching her with fascination for the past few weeks, now got up from her desk and went over to her. “Can I help you, Matilda?” she asked.

“I’m wondering what to read next,” Matilda said. “I’ve finished all the children’s books.”

“You mean you’ve looked at the pictures?”

“Yes, but I’ve read the books as well.”

Mrs Phelps looked down at Matilda from her great height and Matilda looked right back up at her.

“I thought some were very poor,” Matilda said, “but others were lovely. I liked The Secret Garden best of all. It was full of mystery. The mystery of the room behind the closed door and the mystery of the garden behind the big wall.”

Mrs Phelps was stunned. “Exactly how old are you, Matilda?” she asked.

“Four years and three months,” Matilda said.

Mrs Phelps was more stunned than ever, but she had the sense not to show it. “What sort of a book would you like to read next?” she asked.

Matilda said, “I would like a really good one that grown-ups read. A famous one. I don’t know any names.”

Mrs Phelps looked along the shelves, taking her time. She didn’t quite know what to bring out. How, she asked herself, does one choose a famous grown-up book for a four-year-old girl? Her first thought was to pick a young teenager’s romance of the kind that is written for fifteen-year-old schoolgirls, but for some reason she found herself instinctively walking past that particular shelf.

“Try this,” she said at last. “It’s very famous and very good. If it’s too long for you, just let me know and I’ll find something shorter and a bit easier.”

“Great Expectations,” Matilda read, “by Charles Dickens. I’d love to try it.”

I must be mad, Mrs Phelps told herself, but to Matilda she said, “Of course you may try it.”

Over the next few afternoons Mrs Phelps could hardly take her eyes from the small girl sitting for hour after hour in the big armchair at the far end of the room with the book on her lap. It was necessary to rest it on the lap because it was too heavy for her to hold up, which meant she had to sit leaning forward in order to read. And a strange sight it was, this tiny dark-haired person sitting there with her feet nowhere near touching the floor, totally absorbed in the wonderful adventures of Pip and old Miss Havisham and her cobwebbed house and by the spell of magic that Dickens the great story-teller had woven with his words. The only movement from the reader was the lifting of the hand every now and then to turn over a page, and Mrs Phelps always felt sad when the time came for her to cross the floor and say, “It’s ten to five, Matilda.”

During the first week of Matilda’s visits Mrs Phelps had said to her, “Does your mother walk you down here every day and then take you home?”

“My mother goes to Aylesbury every afternoon to play bingo,” Matilda had said. “She doesn’t know I come here.”

“But that’s surely not right,” Mrs Phelps said. “I think you’d better ask her.”

“I’d rather not,” Matilda said. “She doesn’t encourage reading books. Nor does my father.”

“But what do they expect you to do every afternoon in an empty house?”

“Just mooch around and watch the telly.”

“She doesn’t really care what I do,” Matilda said a little sadly.

Mrs Phelps was concerned about the child’s safety on the walk through the fairly busy village High Street and the crossing of the road, but she decided not to interfere.

Within a week, Matilda had finished Great Expectations which in that edition contained four hundred and eleven pages. “I loved it,” she said to Mrs Phelps. “Has Mr Dickens written any others?”

“A great number,” said the astounded Mrs Phelps. “Shall I choose you another?”

Over the next six months, under Mrs Phelps’s watchful and compassionate eye, Matilda read the following books:

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Gone to Earth by Mary Webb

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Good Companions by J. B. Priestley

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

Animal Farm by George Orwell

It was a formidable list and by now Mrs Phelps was filled with wonder and excitement, but it was probably a good thing that she did not allow herself to be completely carried away by it all. Almost anyone else witnessing the achievements of this small child would have been tempted to make a great fuss and shout the news all over the village and beyond, but not so Mrs Phelps. She was someone who minded her own business and had long since discovered it was seldom worth while to interfere with other people’s children.

“Mr Hemingway says a lot of things I don’t understand,” Matilda said to her. “Especially about men and women. But I loved it all the same. The way he tells it I feel I am right there on the spot watching it all happen.”

“A fine writer will always make you feel that,” Mrs Phelps said. “And don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.”

“I will, I will.”

“Did you know”, Mrs Phelps said, “that public libraries like this allow you to borrow books and take them home?”

“I didn’t know that,” Matilda said. “Could I do it?”

“Of course,” Mrs Phelps said. “When you have chosen the book you want, bring it to me so I can make a note of it and it’s yours for two weeks. You can take more than one if you wish.”

From then on, Matilda would visit the library only once a week in order to take out new books and return the old ones. Her own small bedroom now became her reading-room and there she would sit and read most afternoons, often with a mug of hot chocolate beside her. She was not quite tall enough to reach things around the kitchen, but she kept a small box in the outhouse which she brought in and stood on in order to get whatever she wanted. Mostly it was hot chocolate she made, warming the milk in a saucepan on the stove before mixing it. Occasionally she made Bovril or Ovaltine. It was pleasant to take a hot drink up to her room and have it beside her as she sat in her silent room reading in the empty house in the afternoons. The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.

Matilda’s parents owned quite a nice house with three bedrooms upstairs, while on the ground floor there was a dining-room and a living-room and a kitchen. Her father was a dealer in second-hand cars and it seemed he did pretty well at it.

“Sawdust”, he would say proudly, “is one of the great secrets of my success. And it costs me nothing. I get it free from the sawmill.”

“What do you use it for?” Matilda asked him.

“Ha!” the father said. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“I don’t see how sawdust can help you to sell second-hand cars, daddy.”

“That’s because you’re an ignorant little twit,” the father said. His speech was never very delicate but Matilda was used to it. She also knew that he liked to boast and she would egg him on shamelessly.

“You must be very clever to find a use for something that costs nothing,” she said. “I wish I could do it.”

“You couldn’t,” the father said. “You’re too stupid. But I don’t mind telling young Mike here about it seeing he’ll be joining me in the business one day.” Ignoring Matilda, he turned to his son and said, “I’m always glad to buy a car when some fool has been crashing the gears so badly they’re all worn out and rattle like mad. I get it cheap. Then all I do is mix a lot of sawdust with the oil in the gear-box and it runs as sweet as a nut.”

“How long will it run like that before it starts rattling again?” Matilda asked him.

“Long enough for the buyer to get a good distance away,” the father said, grinning. “About a hundred miles.”

“But that’s dishonest, daddy,” Matilda said. “It’s cheating.”

“No one ever got rich being honest,” the father said. “Customers are there to be diddled.”

Mr Wormwood was a small ratty-looking man whose front teeth stuck out underneath a thin ratty moustache. He liked to wear jackets with large brightly-coloured checks and he sported ties that were usually yellow or pale green. “Now take mileage for instance,” he went on. “Anyone who’s buying a second-hand car, the first thing he wants to know is how many miles it’s done. Right?”

“Right,” the son said.

“So I buy an old dump that’s got about a hundred and fifty thousand miles on the clock. I get it cheap. But no one’s going to buy it with a mileage like that, are they? And these days you can’t just take the speedometer out and fiddle the numbers back like you used to ten years ago. They’ve fixed it so it’s impossible to tamper with it unless you’re a ruddy watchmaker or something. So what do I do? I use my brains, laddie, that’s what I do.”

“How?” young Michael asked, fascinated. He seemed to have inherited his father’s love of crookery.

“I sit down and say to myself, how can I convert a mileage reading of one hundred and fifty thousand into only ten thousand without taking the speedometer to pieces? Well, if I were to run the car backwards for long enough then obviously that would do it. The numbers would click backwards, wouldn’t they? But who’s going to drive a flaming car in reverse for thousands and thousands of miles? You couldn’t do it!”

“Of course you couldn’t,” young Michael said.

“So I scratch my head,” the father said. “I use my brains. When you’ve been given a fine brain like I have, you’ve got to use it. And all of a sudden, the answer hits me. I tell you, I felt exactly like that other brilliant fellow must have felt when he discovered penicillin. ‘Eureka!’ I cried. ‘I’ve got it!’”

“What did you do, dad?” the son asked him.

“The speedometer”, Mr Wormwood said, “is run off a cable that is coupled up to one of the front wheels. So first I disconnect the cable where it joins the front wheel. Next, I get one of those high-speed electric drills and I couple that up to the end of the cable in such a way that when the drill turns, it turns the cable backwards. You got me so far? You following me?”

“Yes, daddy,” young Michael said.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Young Readers Group; Reprint edition (August 16, 2007)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0142410373
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0142410370
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 6 - 10 years, from customers
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 840L
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 3 - 7
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.24 x 5.42 x 0.63 inches
• #63 in Children's Classics
• #64 in Children's Humor
• #65 in Children's Fantasy & Magic Books

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Roald Dahl Matilda with amazing artwork

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About the authors

The son of Norwegian parents, Roald Dahl was born in Wales in 1916 and educated at Repton. He was a fighter pilot for the RAF during World War Two, and it was while writing about his experiences during this time that he started his career as an author.

His fabulously popular children's books are read by children all over the world. Some of his better-known works include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr Fox, Matilda, The Witches, and The BFG.

He died in November 1990.

Quentin Blake

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

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Falling in Love with Reading & Roald Dahl’s Matilda | 25 Years of Matilda

Penguin Teen: I think it’s safe to say that Matilda falls head over heels in love with books. She takes a wagon to gather them from the library. She hides away in her room and reads them for hours. She loves the worlds, the knowledge, the writing. What was it like for you to fall in love with books for the first time? Was it similar to Matilda’s experience? Do you remember reading  Matilda  for the first time?

Bianca Schulze:  For me, falling in love with books could be compared with a romantic comedy in which a woman awakens one day only to realize that the boy she’s always considered her best friend is actually the man she wants to marry. Books have always been accessible to me: my mom read to me as a child, my mom read her own books in front of me and would disappear into the pages for hours, and I have had a library card for as long as I can remember—and lots of late fees too. However, it wasn’t until I became a parent that I realized that these objects full of words were a lifelong passion—I had always enjoyed books, but I was now officially “in love” with books.

I never considered myself a bookworm, but reflecting back to my childhood years I have some very fond memories that involve books and that would indicate I was always destined to be a lover of books:

• I used to build homes for Barbie out of Golden Books.
• I would spend entire recess and lunch breaks searching for Waldo in the  Where’s Waldo? books.
• I dreamed of running my own babysitting club just like the characters in Ann M. Martin’s series The Baby-sitters Club .
• I listened to many books on tape— The Wizard of Oz book on tape scared me, but I tortured myself regularly with the flying monkeys and dramatic background music.
• I also, of course, delighted in the wonderfully wicked worlds that Roald Dahl created in his books.

I can whole-heartedly say that my experience of falling in love with books was similar to Matilda’s: Once I realized how much I love to read, I immersed myself in literature—I even went as far as creating this blog! I only wish that I had realized how much I enjoyed the company of books as early as Matilda did—she’s a little genius! Now, perhaps if I had actually read Matilda as a child, it’s possible I would have connected the dots and found my calling as a literature enthusiast much sooner—perhaps I’d even be a published author.

Throughout my childhood, I read many of Dahl’s other books:  James and the Giant Peach , Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator , Fantastic Mr. Fox , The Witches , The Twits (my second favorite) and (my favorite) Revolting Rhymes . Dahl’s talent lies within his power to create poignant satire—his ability to touch the hearts of young readers through absurdity is unmarked. This is why I am so thrilled to introduce Roald Dahl to my seven-year-old with the book loving character Matilda. I will always remember the first time I read Matilda because I’m currently sharing this moment with my daughter who so clearly is already in love with books. I know I am creating a lifelong reader and, with any luck, a reader that will continue to have a wickedly good sense of humor. Thank you Roald Dahl (forever in my reading heart) for your creative writing and thank you Matilda for empowering young girls to be knowledgeable and brave!

About Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl (1916-1990) was born in Llandaff, South Wales, and went to Repton School in England. His parents were Norwegian, so holidays were spent in Norway. As he explains in Boy, he turned down the idea of university in favor of a job that would take him to “a wonderful faraway place.” In 1933 he joined the Shell Company, which sent him to Mombasa in East Africa. When World War II began in 1939 he became a fighter pilot and in 1942 was made assistant air attaché in Washington, where he started to write short stories. His first major success as a writer for children was in 1964. Thereafter his children’s books brought him increasing popularity, and when he died children mourned the world over.  Matilda  was published just two years before he died. Quentin Blake, the first Children’s Laureate of the United Kingdom, has illustrated most of Roald Dahl’s children’s books.

Book Overview

Matilda is a genius. Unfortunately, her family treats her like a dolt. Her crooked car-salesman father and loud, bingo-obsessed mother think Matilda’s only talent is as a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in their miserable lives. But it’s not long before the sweet and sensitive child decides to fight back. Faced with practical jokes of sheer brilliance, her parents don’t stand a chance. Matilda applies her untapped mental powers to rid the school of the evil, child-hating headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, and restore her nice teacher, Miss Honey, to financial security.

Add this book to your collection:   Matilda

Be sure to visit the Official  Matilda  Facebook page to keep up with all things Matilda! To find out more about  Matilda the Musical on Broadway , visit their Facebook page!

For the next stop on the Matilda 25th Anniversary blog tour, head to Live to Read !

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Bianca Schulze is the founder of The Children’s Book Review. She is a reader, reviewer, mother and children’s book lover. She also has a decade’s worth of experience working with children in the great outdoors. Combined with her love of books and experience as a children’s specialist bookseller, the goal is to share her passion for children’s literature to grow readers. Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, she now lives with her husband and three children near Boulder, Colorado.

Just saw the musical in New York about a month ago. It was hilarious. Miss Trunchbull was the star of the show for sure. No one can do absurd, sweet and dark all at the same time quite like Dahl.

I’m so envious that you have watched the musical!! I really hope to see it sometime.

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Tiger Riding for Beginners

Bernie gourley: traveling poet-philosopher & aspiring puddle dancer.

BOOK REVIEW: Matilda by Roald Dahl

Amazon page

[The Sarah Walsh illustrated edition comes out October 13, 2020.]

Matilda is a precocious child with parents who are negligent and verbally abusive. The story picks up shortly before Matilda is set to begin kindergarten, presumably so that we can learn that she is a preschool autodidact and that she has crappy parents. We also witness how she takes to “punishing” her parents whenever one or both of them behave in a particularly vile manner, using what might best be described as pranks. The empowerment of children, girls, and bookish people is the central theme of the book

Matilda begins school and is at once delighted to find a kind and caring teacher, Ms. Honey, and dismayed to find that the Principal, Mrs. Trunchbull, is a horrible woman. While Ms. Honey recognizes Matilda’s brilliance, she cannot get the girl advanced to a suitable grade because both Matilda’s parents and Trunchbull refuse to recognize the girl’s intellect. Dahl takes on both the cause of feminism and the plight of nerds. In the case of the former, we see how Matilda is disregarded by both her parents because she is a girl and they don’t see much value in her education and can’t fathom that she would be good at learning. While Matilda’s brother doesn’t exactly get top-notch parenting, at least some effort is made to advance his education. In the case of the latter, Dahl shows the derision for reading and studiousness that is all too common in society.

I won’t delve into the details of the balance of the story except to say that when Matilda discovers that Ms. Honey’s life is even more harrowing than her own, the young girl resolves to use her talents and capabilities to help improve Honey’s lot.

I read the version of the book, illustrated by Sarah Walsh, that is coming out in the autumn of 2020. Dahl’s story is the same, but the art is different. Having seen the Quentin Blake illustrated books, I’m aware of the difference between the two. However, as a non-artist, I don’t have much vocabulary to give a detailed description of said difference. I can say the Blake art is more reminiscent of old comic strips and the Walsh work was more cleanly drawn and “realistic,” while maintaining a general sense of whimsy and a bright color palette. I enjoyed the artwork, though I don’t claim a particular eye for such things.

I’d highly recommend this book for fiction readers. It’s written for children, but if you’ve gotten to adulthood without checking it out, it’s worth going back to read it. While the villainy maybe over-the-top for adult readers (i.e. there aren’t any nuanced characters,) the story has emotional resonance and is satisfyingly concluded. As to the question of the age of children it is good for, I don’t have much expertise in that either. However, as a litmus test, ask yourself if you think the kid can assimilate the image of Trunchbull swinging a girl by her ponytails – as in the hammer-throw – and tossing her over a fence.

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10 thoughts on “ BOOK REVIEW: Matilda by Roald Dahl ”

I still have my copy from when I was 10 years old. Brilliant review of an amazing book! 👍🖤

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You’re most welcome 🖤

I have not read this one but will be sure to check it out. Dahl is a true master that I found as an adult 🙂

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Read the book in fourth and fifth grade before seeing the film version, which I now have on DVD.

Yes! Love Dahl 🙂 I went to see the RSC musical of Matilda, and it reminded me of how I loved the book when I was younger. I’ve also found that Dahl did some adult fiction – have you come across it? I reviewed his short story ‘Taste’ on my blog if you’re interested!

I’ve read the two parts of his memoirs, but don’t know that I’ve read any of his fiction that targets adults — if I have it must have been short form.

Yeah, I’ve not heard of any longer form adult fiction by Dahl – he published a bunch of short stories under the collection title ‘Kiss Kiss’, I believe. 🙂 Did you enjoy the memoirs? Perhaps I will look them up. 🙂

The first part “Boy” is kind of aimed at kids [it’s a little bit of a Matilda story applied to his own life in boarding school.] The second part — Going Solo — is written to appeal more to adults is split between his life as a combat pilot in WWII and his life in Africa. He led and interesting life. Both parts are short and readable. I enjoyed them.

Amazing, thanks! I’ll definitely have a look. 😊 If they’re short… stay tuned on my blog for my inevitable review of them!! 😂❤️📚

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Book Series Recaps

So what happened in book one.

Review of Matilda

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No spoilers in this review of the Matilda by Roald Dahl .

Special thanks to Sarina Byron, a BSR contributor who wrote this great review! Sarina is a British Author and Contributing Writer living in California. Sarina enjoys bringing forth a different perspective and encouraging a different way of thinking through her writing. Visit her blog to read her reviews, and check the end of the review for a link to her Instagram.

Matilda Wormwood has long fascinated us. Since our first introduction to her in 1988, we have been trying to understand Matilda in multiple ways. Whether by way of the Danny DeVito -directed movie or the Netflix musical , this five-year-old continues to fascinate us for over four decades. One might ask, what makes her special? 

Is it that she can read Dickens and speak with an adult-level vocabulary? Or is it that she has the smarts to punish her neglectful, ignorant, and cruel parents? When I think about Matilda, this is the question that haunts me—What makes Matilda special? 

Keeping her face to the sun

No matter the state of her home or school, Matilda is always cheerful. She was raised within a family that barely bothered to tend to her needs. She learnt to feed and dress herself when she was two years old. No one bothered to teach her the alphabet, and yet she learnt to read. Her determination brought her to the library where she continued to further her education. When she joins Crunchem Hall, her bright future is clouded over by the terrifying Headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. 

Despite all these drawbacks, she finds a way to stay cheerful. Her spirit is undefeated in the face of numerous setbacks. Her hindrances are placed by the very people who are meant to help her. Nevertheless, at no point does one see Matilda despair. Even at five years old, she knows that she alone is enough, and there is always a way. Something about her “keep your face to the sun” attitude makes our heart go out to her. Perhaps we’ll never know if we could have been as strong as Matilda when we were children. But she fortifies our confidence in the strength of the young. In her own words . . . 

“ Children are not so serious as grown-ups and they love to laugh.” 

Never suffering bullies

Matilda’s father makes a minor linguistic error. He tells her, “When a person is bad, that person has to be taught a lesson.” As the masterful Roald Dahl points out, when Mr. Wormwood used person instead of child, he taught Matilda a valuable lesson—punishments are not limited to children. Matilda makes a connection. So far, she understood bullying behavior as incorrect, but now she feels empowers to punish them. 

Deeply insightful, she is instantly able to identify unfair treatment. She can follow the lane of logic, spotting any deviations or roadblocks placed by bullies. Amongst her other enduring legacies, this one jumps out the most. Roald Dahl enriches her character with his dislike for bullies. Using the example of the most innocent creature he can think of, he teaches us to speak up for ourselves, like when Matilda tells The Trunchbull she has indeed read Nicholas Nickleby . Why should someone else feel entitled to wipe out her achievements? Another instance Matilda takes charge is the time she mixes peroxide in her father’s hair oil to punish him for destroying her library book. 

Matilda’s perspective impacts more people than she intends to. Miss Honey had never spoken of her miserable existence until she meets this gifted child. She isn’t fighting fit yet, but she is strong enough to confront how she feels. In Miss Honey’s own words:

“You can’t imagine what it’s like to be completely controlled by a very strong personality. It turns you to jelly.”

Take it from Miss Honey: Never allow anyone to turn you to jelly, no matter who they are. 

Going the whole haul 

When Lavender wonders aloud how The Trunchbull got away with her atrocious behavior, Matilda’s answer drips with deep insight. 

“Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is completely crazy, it’s unbelievable.”

A perfect assessment of the Headmistress’s attitude, this statement is also a fantastic decree to live by. Matilda understands that the more outrageous you are, the more unbelievable your actions appear to people, increasing your chances of success. Perhaps we could all live like that. So many of us would rather give up on our dreams than be ridiculous. Maybe trading in reason and logic for over the top and absurd will deliver us from being disappointed in ourselves. 

Even in denouncing a great terror, Matilda gives us something valuable. 

Going forward is paramount

The thing about life is, as much as we love to look back, we have to keep moving forward. However, we almost always forget that. Looking back is tempting because it makes sense as we neatly arrange things in the order they occurred and insert lessons we learnt. Life though, is not lived in retrospect; it is always lived forward.

“The whole object of life Headmistress is to go forward”

Roald Dahl delivers this fantastic life insight via Miss Honey, reminding us of the power of great writing. What makes books relatable is not perfect grammar or prose-filled sentences but the ability to connect. Roald Dahl has masterfully built the characters and chapters to deliver sagacious lessons. Matilda’s story does so in every chapter, thereby touching our hearts more often than we are prepared for. After all, a book has a larger purpose than the story. 

As I closed Matilda and reflected on what I would include in my review, several simple lessons stood out. There is plenty of expert storytelling and character building to reflect upon, but what we really take away is the relatable parts. Children’s books are often overlooked, but the truth is, the well-written ones connect the most with adults. You see, they’re built to deliver important life lessons in the simplest way possible. Maybe we can all do with a reminder from our early years, or perhaps we can leave the job to Matilda!

Let us know what you think about Matilda and Sarina’s great review in the comments! No spoilers on this page, please!

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Book Review: Matilda

Roald Dahl's Matilda, is a good short read. The concept of a heroine rising to action is decently intriguing. However, the book feels very lackluster with its characters being so one dimensional. While the characters are great for its intended audience, creating some depth to characters can always benefit a novel. Overall, the book is great for younger reader and those looking for a short book that has a lot of fun packed into it.

Book Review: Matilda(Spoiler Free) – Favbookshelf

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Making a name in children’s literature is hard, but Roald Dahl has done a fantastic job with his book Matilda. So, here we bring to you Matilda book review

About The Book:

Title: Matilda

Author: Roald Dahl

Genre: Children’s literature, Humor, Fantasy

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Type: Standalone

Goodreads rating: 4.3/5

Matilda is the story of a young girl with a magical mind. As a young child of four, she possesses as many reading skills as any average adult. This story is about the perseverance of a young child to prove that she does not need any adult to make her learn and that there really is no right age to start learning.

Matilda Book Review

Matilda is one of children’s literature’s most influential and famous books. I read this book in middle school, and it is still one of my favorite books when I need a good laugh.

The cover of this book depicts precisely what the story is about. The illustration of a young girl sitting on top of a mountain in the book represents the titular character’s passion for reading. The cover also matches the reading population of the book, which is usually children in their primary or middle school years.

“The books transported her into new world and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives.” Roald Dahl

To read in silence and with perfect surroundings is every reader’s dream. To Matilda, the afternoons in an empty house with a cup of hot drink were an ideal paradise.

Even after reading the book many times, each read opens dimensions to the various characters. Matilda’s class teacher Miss Jenifer Honey played the role of a mentor in Matilda’s life. She understood Matilda’s capabilities very well and supported her wholeheartedly.

She developed a special bond with Matilda, like a parent and a child. But, on the contrary, the book also has many negative characters with no development whatsoever. Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood, Matilda’s parents, and the Headmistress of Matilda’s school, Miss Trunchbull, play a somewhat villainous role in the book and attempt to slow down the protagonist’s progress.

” Never do anything by halves, if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable” Roald Dahl

One of the best things I like about this book is the surprisingly light sense of humor in the storyline. The practical jokes Matilda played on her parents have me crackling with laughter straightaway every time. The sheer brilliance of the schemes, plus the fact that the mastermind was a small girl, makes it even more fascinating.

The overall writing style of this book is intriguing. The straightforward sentence structure and language make it perfect for a light read. Even with the themes of bullying, abandonment, and ignorance, the book still has a light feel.

Rating: 5/5 Recommendation: 100%

Matilda is a masterpiece. It is perfect for teens and tweens for a light read, and its delicate sense of humor also makes it ideal for adults. I obviously recommend this book to anyone who wants a calm reading experience without much use of the mind. Also, this is the perfect book to develop a reading habit, as it leaves the reader striving for more.

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About the author:.

Roald Dahl was a British novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter of Norwegian descent who rose to prominence in the 1940s with works for children and adults and became one of the world’s bestselling authors. In addition, he was a spy, ace fighter pilot, chocolate historian, and medical inventor. He was also the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, and many more brilliant stories.

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How did Ian Fleming create James Bond? He looked in the mirror.

A new biography, ‘ian fleming: the complete man,’ by nicholas shakespeare, recounts the storied life of the writer behind 007.

Some years ago, I gave a talk to the graduating seniors at a local school. Whatever I said that night — probably something about the importance of books and reading — has utterly vanished from my memory except for three words. During the question period, a young woman stood up and asked, “Mr. Dirda, what fictional character would you most like to be?” A number of possibilities flashed through my mind, and I almost said Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy, because then I’d be married to Elizabeth Bennet. But instead, I put on my most sardonic smile and silkily whispered into the microphone, “Bond, James Bond.”

It’s hard to imagine that I might have answered “Secretan, James Secretan.” That was what Ian Fleming initially called his hero in the typescript of “Casino Royale,” first published in April 1953. Fortunately, just as Arthur Conan Doyle realized that Sherrinford Holmes wasn’t quite the right name for the greatest of all detectives, Fleming recognized that he needed something punchier than “Secretan” for the greatest of all secret agents.

According to Nicholas Shakespeare, in his huge, immensely detailed new biography, “ Ian Fleming: The Complete Man ,” there may have been two or three sources behind the final, seemingly inevitable choice. The 43-year-old Fleming, who was living two months of each year in Jamaica, regularly consulted “Birds of the West Indies,” by a Philadelphia ornithologist named James Bond. And back when he was working in British Naval Intelligence during World War II, one operation was saved from disaster by a heroic Rodney Bond. Somehow, though, I can’t imagine we’d be watching movies today about Rodney Bond.

One of the strengths — or, arguably, weaknesses — of Shakespeare’s 821-page biography is its length. If not exactly too much of a good thing, there’s always a little more than seems necessary. Take the long central section devoted to Fleming’s wartime intelligence work. While documentation is sketchy, since the relevant records were either destroyed or remain classified, Shakespeare deduces that Fleming was far more than the deskbound assistant to the head of Naval Intelligence and quite probably the department’s guiding mastermind. In these chapters, he describes in detail espionage strategies, meetings with American spymasters and botched operations — all of which may well be catnip to students of military history but will send other readers off for a cat nap. In any event, Fleming almost certainly based Bond on a composite of several agents and commandos he knew, as well as himself and his intrepid older brother, Peter Fleming, who is now remembered mainly for the classic travel book “Brazilian Adventure.”

Overall, though, “Ian Fleming: The Complete Man” is a dazzling, even dizzying achievement, despite that ludicrous-sounding subtitle. A “complete man,” Fleming believed, would resemble one of those swashbuckling Elizabethan all-rounders who were simultaneously poets, courtiers, lovers and soldiers. For Fleming, I think being a “complete man” remained largely aspirational. In his personal life, he was, by turns, a youthful rebel, a resentful mama’s boy, a modern-day Don Juan and a middle-aged melancholiac.

Consider his family background, tailor-made for psychological disaster. Grandfather Robert Fleming was Britain’s leading banker, one of the richest men in the world. After Ian’s father, Valentine, was killed during World War I, Winston Churchill, no less, wrote the obituary for the Times. From that point on, Val was held up to his four young sons as an unattainable ideal. His widow, Eve, would blackmail the boys into doing what she wanted by invoking their father’s spirit and example. As it happens, the eldest, Peter, excelled at everything effortlessly, from athletics to academics, was dubbed the “king” of Eton and was even regarded as a good bet to become a future prime minister. Born in 1908, Ian, the moody, insecure second son, dwelled in Peter’s shadow until the Bond novels reversed the relationship. The two youngest brothers happily entered the banking business but, like Scottish lairds, spent as much time as possible hunting and fishing on their highland estate.

Eve Fleming ruled Ian through her absolute control of the family purse strings. She even made him break up with the woman he wanted to marry by threatening to cut off his allowance. Mummy herself was extravagant in every way: A maid said that if it were raining, Eve would put on a new pair of shoes to walk to her waiting car and never wear them again. She never remarried, partly because her late husband’s will stipulated that she would then forfeit much of her enormous wealth. But this didn’t preclude an affair with the painter Augustus John, with whom she had a daughter, Ian’s half sister, Amaryllis.

As Ian grew up, he not only discovered an ability to charm women, he also used it. Again and again, Shakespeare notes his subject’s casual seductions, affairs with the girlfriends and wives of his friends, and, most disagreeably, a gigolo-like willingness to accept gifts and money from rich older women in his thrall — one gave him the equivalent of what would today be a quarter-million dollars to build his Jamaican compound, Goldeneye. While obviously whip smart and capable, Fleming nonetheless found nearly all his jobs, starting with a stint as a journalist for Reuters, through the interventions of fond women.

Yet, once hired, he would quickly win the almost paternal affection of his boss, whether Adm. John Godfrey of Naval Intelligence or Lord Kemsley, owner of the Sunday Times, who made him the paper’s foreign editor, with an exorbitant salary and two months of paid holiday each year. Fleming lived luxuriously even before the first Bond movies started to bring in the serious cash. While 007 might occasionally be an agent provocateur, his creator was always an agent-entrepreneur.

Again and again, Shakespeare’s biography reminds us of what a tight little island Britain could be for those of its privileged class. If you’ve read any of the books about the Brideshead generation , you’ll find many of the same people cropping up in Fleming’s life, including the critic Cyril Connolly, a former Eton classmate, and Evelyn Waugh, whose novels Fleming would like to have written more than his own. He even counted the multitalented showman Noel Coward as a confidant and once shared a wealthy girlfriend with Roald Dahl, to whom he gave the idea for a famous story, “Lamb to the Slaughter.”

Then there was the socialite Ann O’Neill (nee Charteris), whose Etonian husband was killed in World War II while she was having an intense affair with the newspaper magnate Esmond Rothermere, whom she eventually married. Soon thereafter, Ann broke Rothermere’s heart by sleeping with their friend Ian Fleming. Against the advice of almost everyone he knew, Ian married Ann in 1952, having kept his mind off the upcoming nuptials by writing “Casino Royale.” It took him just a month. A son was soon born, but the new Mrs. Fleming loved dinner parties and house guests, while her new husband was at his happiest snorkeling and playing golf. Neither was faithful to the other.

As with his excellent biography of the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, Shakespeare has produced one of those books you can happily live in for weeks. It will deservedly become the standard life of Ian Fleming, replacing a fine one by Andrew Lycett that appeared almost 30 years ago. Bond devotees, however, should be aware that there are no close analyses of the novels, and the only films discussed are the early ones with which Fleming was involved. But Shakespeare certainly recognizes that Bond’s creator, especially when young, behaved much like his hero toward women — in fact, much worse. He regularly comes across as a callous, sexist jerk, no matter how vehemently his friends, lovers and admirers testify to the man’s charisma, thoughtfulness and ability to light up a room. Not even Fleming’s book collecting — he focused on works that changed history — wholly improves his image: It seems to have been more for ostentation than for use. However, he did establish and underwrite Britain’s premier bibliophilic journal, the Book Collector, an act that pays many debts.

A far more likable, even mellow Fleming appears in his letters, edited by his nephew Fergus Fleming for the book “The Man With the Golden Typewriter” (2015). The creator of James Bond could be remarkably courteous in answering correspondents, even those who pointed out his factual errors or other slips. Didn’t he know that the perfume Vent Vert came from Balmain, not Dior, and that a Beretta is a lady’s gun rather than a proper weapon for a secret agent? The letters also make plain that the directors of the publisher Jonathan Cape despised the Bond books, regarding them as sadistic trash even though they ended up keeping the firm afloat.

Fleming died in 1964 at the relatively young age of 56 from cardiac disease, to which smoking 60 or more cigarettes a day doubtless contributed. Today, the real question is: Do the original James Bond thrillers stand up to rereading in the 21st century?

All too often, the only version of 007 most people are familiar with is the one created by Hollywood. Until the humorless, even unpleasant, albeit gripping Daniel Craig films, most of the Bond movies could be likened to commedia dell’arte, drawing on a set formula and softening the violence with cheeky quips, double entendres and even a weird campiness, as in the two films featuring Jaws, the assassin with steel teeth. The movies remain, above all, pure eye candy through their glamorous settings, expertly choreographed action sequences and one gorgeous “Bond girl” after another. Not that Bond himself isn’t the ultimate heartthrob. As I once heard a woman sigh, most men are boys, Sean Connery is a man.

Over the years, the movies have paid less and less attention to the Fleming thrillers from which they borrow their titles. In my experience, the original books — a dozen novels and two short-story collections — remain compulsive page-turners, while being grounded in their time, the Cold War era of the 1950s. Bond is nothing if not patriotic and deeply conservative. In “Casino Royale,” he maintains that “women were for recreation,” while in “Live and Let Die” the Black characters are largely stereotypes. Whether working for SMERSH or SPECTRE, Fleming’s villains invariably turn out to be “foreigners”: Even Sir Hugo Drax, from “Moonraker,” was born Hugo von der Drache.

Still, the best novels — “Casino Royale,” “From Russia, With Love,” “Dr. No,” “Moonraker” and “Goldfinger” — surmount any occasional drawbacks, energized as they are by elements from Fleming’s own life as well as by the speed and freshness of his prose. Who else could make a long chapter about a bridge game (in “Moonraker”) so riveting? Little wonder that poet Philip Larkin spoke of Fleming’s “mesmerizing readability.” What’s more, though the books emphasize action and violence, they don’t utterly shy away from elegance and lyricism, or even the occasional philosophical reflection:

“Mania, my dear Mister Bond, is as priceless as genius. Dissipation of energy, fragmentation of vision, loss of momentum, the lack of follow-through — these are the vices of the herd.” Doctor No sat slightly back in his chair. “I do not possess these vices. I am, as you correctly say, a maniac — a maniac, Mister Bond, with a mania for power. That” — the black holes glittered blankly at Bond through the contact lenses — “is the meaning of my life. That is why I am here. That is why you are here. That is why here exists.”

Those last three sentences, and particularly the last, demonstrate that when Ian Fleming is on point, nobody does it better.

Ian Fleming

The Complete Man

By Nicholas Shakespeare

Harper. 821 pp. $45

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Delmore Schwartz’s Poems Are Like Salt Flicked on the World

A new omnibus compiles the poet’s books and unpublished work, including his two-part autobiographical masterpiece, “Genesis.”

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The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz , edited by Ben Mazer

Come with me, down the rabbit hole that is the life and work of the Brooklyn-born poet Delmore Schwartz (1913-66). There are two primary portals into Delmore World. Neither involves his own verse. Reading about Schwartz is more invigorating than reading him, or so I have long thought. He was so intense and unbuttoned that he inspired two of the best books of the second half of the 20th century.

The first portal is James Atlas’s 1977 biography, “ Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet .” Atlas’s book has more drama and critical insight than seven or eight typical American literary biographies. I would be hard-pressed to name a better one written in the past 50 years, in terms of its style-to-substance ratio and the fat it gets into the pan.

Atlas follows Schwartz, the bumptious son of Jewish Romanian immigrants, through his alienated childhood and into his early work in the 1930s, when he was considered America’s Auden, the most promising poet of his generation. He captures Schwartz’s downtown Manhattan milieu, long before bohemia became a tourist attraction, and his friendships with Alfred Kazin, John Berryman, Philip Rahv, Robert Lowell and others.

Delmore! He had ardent nostrils; he was photographed by Vogue; he was slovenly and grand; he had read everything; he outtalked the most indefatigable talkers. “Cosmopolitan, radical, at home with Rilke, Trotsky, Pound,” Atlas writes, “he was the very embodiment of the New York intelligentsia.”

Schwartz never fulfilled his early promise. The highway he was on became a path and then a dense forest. He staggered into delusions and writer’s block and insomnia and lawsuits and D.U.I.s and fantasies of revenge and (oh, no!) the saggy parts of rural New Jersey. His tragedy is underscored by the fact that he is best known today for one Bartlett’s-ready quotation: “Even paranoids have real enemies.”

Atlas was lucky that Schwartz left carnage in his wake. The biography is a rolling dessert cart of anecdote. Returning from a party at the sexologist Alfred Kinsey’s house, where he had admired the erotic art, Schwartz was observed skipping through flower beds, singing and shouting “pistils and stamens!” He abruptly ended a long discussion of socialism with the critic R.P. Blackmur by pushing him into the fireplace. And so on.

I felt the impact of Atlas’s book personally. More than 20 years ago — two dogs ago, at any rate — I signed a contract to write a biography of a different American writer of Schwartz’s generation. I never wrote that book, for a slew of reasons. But what really sunk me, early on, was reading Atlas’s book for research and understanding in my bones that I could never write anything so good.

The second portal is Saul Bellow’s novel, “Humboldt’s Gift,” which was inspired by his messy friendship with Schwartz. They had taught at Princeton at the same time. The novel won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize. (“It’s just a dummy newspaper publicity award given by crooks and illiterates,” chortles the Schwartz character, Humboldt, about the Pulitzers.) Bellow captured Schwartz’s pugilistic conversational manner:

To be loused up by Humboldt was really a kind of privilege. It was like being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso, or an eviscerated chicken by Soutine.

Schwartz punched other egos down the way a baker does dough, as if to redistribute the intellectual yeast and allow for an improved rise.

A new book, “The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz,” lets us see this rumpled prodigy fresh. Though his reputation has dimmed, Schwartz has not vanished from bookshelves. The independent publishing house New Directions has loyally kept the flame lit. Its founder, James Laughlin, was Schwartz’s friend and early champion. In return, Schwartz wrote him crazy letters and tapped him for loans.

This collection prints the five full-length books Schwartz published during his lifetime. These include his much disputed translation of Rimbaud’s “Season in Hell.” (Schwartz’s French was limited, and he was criticized for his errors, but the translation was beloved by some.) Much of this material has been out of print for decades. This volume, edited by Ben Mazer, also includes a good deal of previously unpublished work.

I’m going to skip over the bulk of this material. Schwartz’s poems, especially the later ones, are dated. They groan under a freight of leaden rhymes and — Schwartz had a capacious mind — showy philosophical and literary references, spillover from the overstocked pantry that was his mind. A beachcomber will find things to admire but will return with only a small sack of sea glass and bright but mostly broken treasures.

There is something more important to talk about. Unearthed here is Schwartz’s masterpiece, a two-part autobiographical poem in free verse, “Genesis,” which he worked on for more than a decade. It’s so squirming and alive that it will, I suspect, be the rock upon which future considerations of Schwartz will stand. It should be reissued as a stand-alone volume. It’s the sort of book — it presages and compacts the soulfulness of Kazin’s memoirs, Lowell’s confessional verse and Berryman’s melancholy playfulness and irony — that you want to have in portable form. It should not be lost inside a huge collection, as if it were a handgun or a vibrator in the bottom drawer of a chifforobe.

Schwartz published “Genesis: Book 1” in 1943 to mixed reviews, but Atlas shrewdly calls it “the most significant poem of the age.” It has long been out of print. Even tattered copies sell online for more than $1,000, Mazer writes. “Genesis: Book 2,” which is even stronger, has never been published, except in excerpts. Together these volumes take up 300 pages, the molten core of this book.

Schwartz disliked the orotundity of his first name. (His parents thought “Delmore” sounded American.) Lowell noted, in one poem, that Schwartz’s last name was a handful, too, “one vowel bedeviled by seven consonants.” Schwartz tended to give his protagonists unusual names as well. The young hero of “Genesis” is named Hershey, after the candy bar. His surname is Green.

Book 1 takes Hershey up to the age of 7. Book 2 follows him into late adolescence. Future books in the series were considered but not pursued.

The effect of this long and Freudian poem, packed with nostalgic self-plunder, is sweeping and powerful. It gives us family history and an account of Hershey’s parents’ fractured marriage, along with antic personal observation — he is the “Atlantic boy” and “history’s orphan,” emerging puking and squalling from the lower middle class, for whom circumcision is done “with the knife that reached across 5,000 years from Palestine.” Kindergarten is a “Congress of thirty Ids, like a convention/Of a small radical party.” He discovers antisemitism.

Schwartz was one of the great writers about New York City. To young Hershey, the upthrust of office buildings makes Manhattan “look like a monstrous warship,/A dreadnaught!” He describes Long Island as nudging into North America “like an ocean liner coming from Europe.”

Hershey is attended by a Greek chorus of history’s ghosts. The grown poet in him, swinging for the rafters, is allowed to peek through. He speaks for “Genesis” writ large when he says:

Thus now I’ll flick the salt of intellect Upon all things, the critical salt which makes All qualities most vivid and acute.

There is a superb moment in Frederick Exley’s 1968 novel “A Fan’s Notes” — it is one of the great scenes in American literature — when the narrator meditates on literary fandom and his own overweening admiration for the critic Edmund Wilson. Wilson had once written that he was “stranded” in America. Exley’s hero feels an overpowering urge to drive to Wilson’s house in upstate New York, knock on his door and shout: “Eddie, baby! I too am stranded!”

What is so winning about Schwartz at his best, and especially in “Genesis,” is that he is the sort of writer who collapses the difference between a cultivated intellect like Wilson’s and the mind of someone like Exley’s narrator, a literate but excitable and unpretentious embracer of life. Delmore, baby! We’re all stranded!

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF DELMORE SCHWARTZ | Edited by Ben Mazer | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 699 pp. | $50

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade. More about Dwight Garner

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