shapeshifting little boy and his morbid, chain-smoking grandmother mount a vicious and deadly campaign against a group of feminist wiccans who only want to rid the world of toxic pests. this was a tough read, emotional and grueling. Dahl clearly empathizes with the spiritualists - who function more like a kind of pagan PTA than anything remotely threatening - and the many disabilities that plague these brave and independent ladies. hair loss and baldness, challenges with the digits of both hands and feet, not to mention the existential trauma of being empowered women in a misogynist, ableist world that constantly favors and rewards young, able-bodied, privileged males and the females who enable them. I really appreciated Dahl's focus on the head wiccan - an admirable leader, a superior organizer, and even a talented singer/songwriter. reading what happens to her, and to the rest of her peers, at the hands of the story's two villains was exceedingly painful. but that's life, right? life is cruel to outsiders and I admire the author for taking such a realistic view of their terrible sufferings. people, let's do the work and learn to do better!

Más como un 3.5 :).

El libro me pareció bonito. Es el primer libro de Roald Dahl que escucho sin haber visto antes la película, así que ahora sí que no tenía idea de qué iba a pasar o de cómo se iban a solucionar las cosas. Estuvo sobre todo MUY gracioso, y creo que tuvo que ver con las voces que hacía la narradora. Cuando escucho audiolibros, todo suele ser muy neutro en cuanto al tono de voz, pero esta mujer sí se divertía exagerando las voces, especialmente las de las brujas, supongo que porque es un libro para niños (aunque los más grandes también podemos disfrutarlo, jajaja).

Me cayó muy bien la abuelita, creo que fue mi personaje favorito de la novela. Y con ese final me dieron ganas de que hubiera una segunda parte.

This is a short blogpost taken from Thoughts on Roald Dahl: The BFG, The Witches & Fantastic Mr. Fox.

The Witches was chosen as part of this year's Halloween Reads and it was a perfect children's book for October! It was everything I hoped it would be from the very first page. Again, it made me think how spot on the adaptations are – they capture the tone of each book perfectly. The Witches is morbidly funny, terrifying and brilliantly inventive, and it'll make any child wonder whether witches really exist; they'll certainly know how to spot them after reading this book. If only Roald Dahl had written much longer stories. Can you imagine how fantastic these books would be if they were full-length novels? The Witches is perfectly creepy, but as with most Roald Dahl stories (I haven't read them all yet!), with an edge of dark humour. You don't see many characters like the boy's grandmother in children's literature now! She may be unconventional, but she adores her grandson and will do anything to help him save himself from the Witches' horrendous plans.

I am not, of course, telling you for one second that your teacher actually is a witch. All I am saying is that she might be one. It is most unlikely. But – here comes the big "but"– not impossible.


I also reviewed this book over on Pretty Books.

Βαθμολογία: 9/10

Τέταρτο βιβλίο του Ρόαλντ Νταλ που διαβάζω, δεύτερο που ανήκει στην παιδική λογοτεχνία, μετά το πολύ ωραίο και κλασικό "Ο Τσάρλι και το εργοστάσιο της σοκολάτας" που διάβασα πέρυσι τον Φεβρουάριο. Λοιπόν, τούτο μου άρεσε πιο πολύ, ίσως γιατί κατά κάποιο τρόπο ήταν ένα "τσικ" πιο μακάβριο, αλλά και πιο αστείο. Αν μη τι άλλο απόλαυσα στο έπακρο το ιδιόρρυθμο χιούμορ, τις τρελές καταστάσεις και όλα τα σκηνικά του βιβλίου, και δεν αισθάνθηκα ότι έχασα κάτι τώρα που το διάβασα σαν ενήλικος. Εντάξει, πιθανότατα θα ένιωθα περισσότερη αγωνία για τον κακομοίρη τον πρωταγωνιστή αν το διάβαζα στην κατάλληλη ηλικία (π.χ. όταν ήμουν δέκα χρονών), όμως σαν ενήλικος απόλαυσα την (σε κάποια σημεία της πλοκής) μακάβρια ατμόσφαιρα, αλλά και όλες τις ιδιορρυθμίες των χαρακτήρων. Και φυσικά ήθελα κάποια στιγμή να δω και την ομότιτλη ταινία του 1990, οπότε έπρεπε να διαβάσω το βιβλίο πρώτα, γιατί έτσι κάνει ένας σωστός βιβλιοφάγος όταν έχει την ευκαιρία. Εννοείται πως τελικά ήταν ένα άκρως ψυχαγωγικό και ευχάριστο βιβλίο (όπως περίμενα να είναι), και όχι απλώς κάτι που έπρεπε να... φύγει από τη μέση, για να δω την ταινία. Διαβάστε το, θα περάσετε καλά.

Roald Dahl is a magnificent author that can bring anything to life.
As a child I loved these books, as an adult my view has not much changed.

I would love to know why I am the only person on the planet who did not like this book. I tried to find some bad reviews on GoodReads, but the only one and two star reviews said things like "Bad no like mousey! dlksk djglsk diewqls!" I'm assuming they were in a foreign language and not written by a kid who could not type, but I was too lazy to click on the profiles. Maybe I should learn the language and go live there, where we can all unite in our hatred of this book.

It seems to me that 90% of the reviews said things like "Scared the crap out of me as a kid, but I like it now." Except...this is supposed to be for kids? So why give it five stars when children can't read it without being frightened?

As an adult I see that this book is about the power of imagination and the triumph of good over evil. I get it. As a teacher and a mother, I think it's the author's perverse attempt to terrify little kids. It's really funny as a grown-up to think about how you hated certain teachers and thought of them as witches; this book brings childhood nostalgia back for this reason. As a kid, though, you end up terrified that you'll see a violet glow in your teacher's eyes if he or she gets short or loses patience with you. I do enough scaring of children just by getting my job done; I don't need a book around that's going to convince kids that I am about to eat them too.

While starting grad school my oldest son was 8. We had moved to Connecticut. I couldn't afford cable, and there being a used bookstore practically one block a way from our new home, I had a couple of dollars in my pocket so that my son could purchase some books. He along with his mother went and grabbed several books. The Witches by Roald Dahl was one of them. It became his favorite book for a while, so as a good parent, I remember reading it back then. Checking for appropriateness was already a lost cause. He had read it and loved it. I recently re-read it and I have several thoughts. Despite being considered a children's book, this book is surprisingly horrifying. I call myself a hardcore horror fan all the time, and there are some real scares here. The witch reveal is one of those descriptions I consider chilling. There is a plot to kill masses of children at one time. The threat level here is rather large. Sure, there is some silliness, but again trigger warnings for threats, pursuit, and hurting of children. Also, Dahl is a really intriguing writer. He knows how to get his audience enrapt pretty quickly. Lastly, the movies both capture the story well and manage to add to the horrific elements.

Non importa chi sei né che aspetto hai. Basta che qualcuno ti ami.

What a fun time I had reading this book as an adult!
I didn't get a chance to read The Witches as a kid so I went into this book not knowing the plot or characters.

The Witches is about a boy and his Grandmamma taking on and stopping a whole coven of witches from doing evil deeds.

The witches in this story are more of the "cooking and eating Hansel" type and not the "helping and protecting munchkins" type.
I loved how Roald Dahl describes the witches along with how evil and cunning they are. He was very imaginative with the characters and all the mischief that goes down in the book.

One of the best parts of this book is the relationship with the little boy and his Grandmamma. It was a loving, accepting and fun relationship. It brought back memories of my own relationship with my grandma.

I also liked how the little boy took a bad situation and turned it into something positive. Something we can all try to do these days!

Highly recommend reading this one. I really enjoyed it!

"Real witches don't ride around on broomsticks. They don't even wear black cloaks and hats. They are vile, cunning, detestable creatures who disguise themselves as nice, ordinary ladies. So how can you tell when you're face to face with one? Well, if you don't know yet you'd better find out quickly-because there's nothing a witch loathes quite as much as children and she'll wield all kinds of terrifying powers to get rid of them"

I did not like this book at all, mainly because of its continuous blatant misogyny, sexism, ableism and fatphobia. Among other issues, this book basically teaches children to be afraid of women and to view women in a very sexist light, as well as be afraid of non-able-normative bodies and demonize deformities, and I don't know how the author thought that would be remotely OK.

Edit: This review mainly focuses on the misogyinistic aspects, but much can also be said about the ableist and fatphobic themes, and even more so in light of the recent movie adaptation of The Witches, which includes the addition of a real-life hand deformity called ectrodactyly instead of the book's cat-like claws, which already resonates with sexist and ableist discourse, but this is even worse when it comes to keep promoting the correlation between villains and deformity :S

"I do not wish to speak badly about women. Most women are lovely. But the fact remains that all witches are women"

Author starts the book claiming he does not have anything against women, then proceeds to write an entire book where the antagonists are monstrous, 2D evil women whose only goal in life is to kill all children. Women who are portrayed as inhuman, ugly, disgusting, vile, and ruthless by nature, for the sake of it. Women who end up being transformed into mice and exterminated as vermin. And because this is the reversal of the initial plan of these we're-just-evil-with-no-more-motivation demonic females, it's all poetic justice, and all the time throughout the book we're supposed to cheer and laugh at the blatant display of frankly appalling misogyny in this book. But OK, yes, "most women are lovely", so no probs here. The fact that the main grown-up antagonist of the witches is another woman - the protagonist's grandmother -, who's hell bent on exterminating all witches worldwide in a planned genocide, made it all even worse for me.

What kind of a reason apart from exploring his misogynistic streak did Dahl have to make a book about monstrous all-female witches who are demonized through and through, when he could have written the exact same book with both female and male witches, and absolutely nothing (except for making the book sexist af) would have changed plot-wise? Add insult to injury with the fact that he actually had the nerve to think he was totally excusing himself and justifying his choice by claiming in the first chapter that 'he doesn't hate women, really (but all the monstrous antagonists are female, coincidence!!)'. In my experience, when someone says "I'm not X, BUT"....they most probably are 'X', but OK.

Also, way to go, Dahl, perpetuating the misogyny and religious fanatism of the very real and historical witch hunts and murders, and making fun of exterminating (female) witches because they're demonic monsters, so that's all cool (of course, some men - male "witches" - were also murdered during the witch hunts, but the victims were predominantly female and there was a strong misogynistic streak in the motivations of these murders).

"There was something indecent about a bald woman", enthuses the male child protagonist. I found it particularly offensive how the author revels in the 'ugliness' of the witches. Throughout the book he's basically saying that if you're a woman and are bald/not conventionally pretty/older/not conventionally feminine, you are inhuman and disgusting and evil. This whole discourse is also very ableist, associating evil with non-able traits, medical conditions and deformities.

All witches are described as ugly and demonic and have to 'pass as normal women' (and able-bodied people) by using uncomfortable high heeled pointy shoes, conventionally feminine clothing and make-up, and scratchy wigs. Similarly to actual women, the shoes hurt their feet, the wigs leave their bare scalps red with sores, they have to conform to compulsory femininity, and they have to conceal how they really look like (with pretty shoes, gloves, wigs, hats, dresses and skirts) in order to not seem like a threat (one could also link all this with transphobic discourse, too :S). Without the femininity of the clothes, the hair and the shoes (which makes them look more like "nice, kind harmless ladies"), they're inhuman monsters, and there's a lot of fixation about the link between their 'ugliness' and lack of femininity and their inherent evil and ruthlessness.

"“I simply cannot tell you how awful they were, and somehow the whole sight was made more grotesque because underneath those frightful scabby bald heads, the bodies were dressed in fashionable and rather pretty clothes. It was monstrous. It was unnatural"

I'm sorry, but if I'm supposed to think it's all cool just because 'he doesn't want to speak badly about women'...it isn't working :/

This book also includes other problematic ideas, so this is just a part of it. The grandmother promotes heavy smoking and children not showering because 'they're safer from the monstrous witches that way', apart from the planned genocide plans and the upholding of the patriarchal statu quo. And there's also quite a lot of fatphobia in the book, especially when it comes to making fun of fat child Bruno Jenkins, who is constantly depicted as eating large amounts of sweets, is not particularly bright, a bit of a bully and a very disagreeable characters, and ends up also dehumanized as a mouse, disgusting his parents so much the grandmother assumes he will be murdered by them :S It's worth noting that the main protagonist, while also being turned into a mouse for life, is not dehumanized as much by far, maybe because he's male, thin and able-bodied? Sigh.

My introduction to the fiction of Roald Dahl is The Witches and this is one of those books whose language and imagination are so exotic that I wanted to scribble down every paragraph, until the story pulled me in and I surrendered to its spell. Published in 1983 with illustrations by Quentin Blake, I was presented a 30th anniversary edition for Christmas--by a dear friend on Goodreads--which includes Blake's etchings. Without the mischievous charcoal drawings to accompany it, Dahl's text alone would be one of the scariest books I've read, electrified with truths only children know about the treachery of adults and the irrational evils of the world.

The story is spun by a seven-year-old British boy whose expertise with REAL WITCHES begins when he travels with his parents to visit his material grandmother in Norway for Christmas. Orphaned in a car accident north of Oslo, the boy is adopted by his grandmother, a big, loving, cigar smoking lady who takes her grandson's mind off tragedy with her stories. Eventually, Grandmamma arrives on the subject of witches. As huge snowflakes fall outside, she cautions the boy that witches are still around and children must be wary of them, as witches despise children, sniffing them out as if they reeked of dog droppings and doing despicable things to them like transforming them into animals.

Content to sit at the feet of his grandmother with the missing thumb and listen to her yarns, the boy is instructed by a family attorney that he is to return to England for his education. Grandmamma goes with him, warning her grandson that they must remain vigilant, as there is a Secret Society of Witches in every country. English witches are on a first-name basis, swapping deadly recipes and plotting to kill children under the direction of The Grand High Witch of All The World, who presides over their secret meetings. By Easter, life has almost returned to normal. The boy busies himself constructing a tree house in a big conker tree in their garden. Alone.

I worked away, nailing the first plank on the roof. Then suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a woman standing immediately below me. She was looking up and me and smiling in the most peculiar way. When most people smile, their lips go out sideways. This woman's lips went upwards and downwards, showing all her front teeth and gums. The gums were like raw meat.

It is always a shock to discover you are being watched when you think you are alone.

And what was this strange woman doing in our garden anyway?

I noticed that she was wearing a small black hat and she had black gloves on her hands and the gloves came up to her elbows.

Gloves! She was wearing gloves!

I froze all over.

"I have a present for you," she said, still staring at me, still smiling, still showing her teeth and gums.

I didn't answer.

"Come down out of that tree, little boy," she said, "and I shall give you the most exciting present you've ever had." Her voice had a curious rasping quality. It made a sort of metallic sound, as though her throat was full of thumbtacks.

The boy survives his encounter in the garden and averts tragedy when his grandmother falls ill with the flu. Unable to take him to the magical places in Norway she's reveled about when summer arrives, she books passage to the seaside town of Bournemouth, where they check in to the Hotel Magnificent. For company, his grandmother gives the boy two white mice, which he names William and Mary. Searching for somewhere he can train his mice far from the prying eyes of hotel management, the boy sneaks into an empty ballroom, reserved for the annual meeting of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Hiding behind a screen, the boy and his White Mouse Circus are unseen as the hotel manager escorts a great flock of ladies into the ballroom. Once they think they're alone, the ladies secure the door with a chain. The boy notices that all of the women wear gloves, just as his grandmother warned him witches do, and scratch at the bald scalps under their wigs, just as witches do. A stylish young lady addresses the meeting, removing her gloves to reveal claws for fingers and taking off her mask to reveal a cankered and worm-eaten face. The Grand High Witch herself goes into a fury with the others for their failure to eradicate England of its children.

Advising the witches to quit their day jobs and open candy stores, the Grand High Witch introduces a concoction she calls Formula 86 Delayed-Mouse Maker. This will transform English children to imbibe it into mice, once they're far away from the scene of the crime. The High Witch tests the stuff out on a gluttonous boy named Bruno Jenkins, lured to his fate by the promise of chocolate. As the meeting breaks up, the boy's scent--concealed by virtue of his not bathing for days--finally gives him away and set upon by witches, he is transformed into a mouse too. Finding he quite enjoys being a mouse, the boy reunites with his grandmother, who sees an opportunity.

All the rooms in the Hotel Magnificent had small private balconies. My grandmother carried me through into my own bedroom and out onto my balcony. We both peered down to the balcony immediately below

"Now if that is her room," I said, "then I'll bet I could climb down there and somehow get in."

"And get caught all over again," my grandmother said. "I won't allow it."

"At this moment," I said, "all the witches are down on the Sunshine Terrace having tea with the Manager. The Grand High Witch probably won't be back until six o'clock, or just before. That's when she's going to dish out supplies of the foul formula to the ancient ones who are too old to climb trees after gruntles' eggs."

"And what if you did manage to get into her room?" my grandmother said. "What then?"

"Then I should try to find the place where she keeps her supply of Delayed-Action Mouse-Maker, and if I succeeded, then I would steal one bottle of it and bring it back here."

"Could you carry it?"

"I think so," I said. "It's a very small bottle."

"I'm frightened of that stuff," my grandmother said. "What would you do with it if you did manage to get it?"

"One bottle is enough for five hundred people," I said. "That would give each and every witch down there a double dose at least. We could turn them all into mice."

My grandmother jumped about an inch in the air. We were out on my balcony and there was a drop of about a million feet below us and I very nearly bounced out of her hand over the railings when she jumped.

Roald Dahl is the truth. I loved how fantasy is used here to strip away the deceit and corruption of the adult world, as opposed to using fantasy for escapism. In Dahl's world, there are no gifted children but normal ones, and magical instruments are in the hands of adults, who use them to victimize the meek. The book is terribly frightening, particularly the appearance of a witch under a boy’s treehouse, but Dahl softens his delivery with language that is witty and delightful, meant to beguile rather than unsettle the reader.

All over the Dining Room women were screaming and strong men were turning white in the face and shouting, "It's crazy! This can't happen! Let's get the heck out of here quick!" Waiters were attacking the mice with chairs and wine bottles and anything else that came to hand. I saw a chef in a tall white hat rushing out from the kitchen brandishing a frying pan, and another one just behind him wielding a carving knife above his head, and everyone was yelling, "Mice! Mice! Mice! We must get rid of the mice!" Only the children in the room were really enjoying it. They all seemed to know instinctively that something good was going on right there in front of them and they were clapping and cheering and laughing like mad.

In addition to his craft with language, Dahl is able to express his love for children even as particularly ghastly things happen to children in his stories. Bad stuff happen when you're a kid, but ingenuity and a good heart are the keys to a better world, while greed ultimately leads to a dead end. A film version of The Witches produced by Jim Henson was released in 1990, the year both Dahl and Henson would pass away, at the ages of 74 and 53, respectively. While the ending of the film was changed to reassure audiences, Dahl's vision is magical, exciting and affirms that change, while terrifying, is a natural part of the world.

What a fun little book to read. Love this authors imagination. A Norwegian grandma who tells stories to her grandson of witches. Their little encounter on a holiday in Bournemouth, England with serious repercussions but they are victorious in the end!