I was recently tasked with buying books for my niece at Christmas, and while that is theoretically right in my wheelhouse, I found myself on less certain ground when it came to children’s books, especially for young girls. As someone who enjoyed the movie, and the musical, and the movie musical, I thought about Roald Dahl’s Matilda. Seeing that the recommended age was a little older than my niece, I thought maybe I would check it out for myself. It turns out that it’s a bit too advanced for even my exceptionally bright niece, though perhaps within a few years she’ll find a copy under the tree.
I’m sure you don’t need me to recap the story, but just to pad the word count: Matilda Wormwood is a lonely little girl who doesn’t fit in with her parents or her older brother, partly because she loves reading books and they love watching mindless TV and partly because her father is a crooked used car salesman and Matilda aspires to be good. When Matilda finally starts school, she is so far advanced beyond her peers that her lovely young teacher Miss Honey lets her study textbooks on her own while she drills the other students in the two-times table.
The fly in the ointment is the headmistress at Matilda’s school, Miss Trunchbull, the former Olympic hammer thrower turned torturer of children. In rapid fire fashion, Matilda finds herself on Miss Trunchbull’s considerable bad side, aligns herself with Miss Honey and learns of her troubled past, and sets everything right with magical abilities that come and go with shocking quickness.
The thing that makes Matilda enjoyable for an adult reader like me is, predictably, the same thing that makes it a bit much for a child too young to appreciate irony. Dahl is terribly funny, unafraid to be mean and judgmental, even towards children. Whether these jokes are said with the proverbial twinkle in the eye or not, they’d be a bit much for my niece.
The illustrations by Quentin Blake are a big part of the novel, but I have to confess to finding them very unappealing visually.
