Fox prepares with the spoils that her fantastic husband triumphantly steals from beneath the dumb farmers’ noses. It’s a thin volume, but the conflict between the Fox family and three greedy farmers is rich in detail, layered with tidbits covering everything from Farmer Bean’s addiction to alcoholic cider to the elaborate dinner party courses Mrs. Fox is exactly the kind of hero Dahl loves namely, he’s always the smartest person fox in the room. Fox, the only book on this list told from the perspective of a (particularly clever) group of animals. Fox (1968)ĭahl took a short break from sympathizing with humans in Fantastic Mr. It has all the sweetness and heart of the best of Dahl’s full-length novels, but it’s tinged with unmistakable melancholy. It is, in a word, variable: There are minor short stories, like the forgettable one with the giant tortoise (no, not Esio Trot, the other one), and autobiographical accounts of Dahl’s life, including how his time as a fighter pilot in World War II led him to start writing.īut the crown jewel of the book is the title story: the tale of Henry Sugar, a selfish gambler who teaches himself to see through solid objects in order to cheat at cards and eventually reforms himself into a secular saint. The Henry Sugar anthology is an odd one to consume in the middle of a Roald Dahl binge, but it’s always been one of my favorites. Caroline Framke 8) The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (1977) As with all of Dahl’s best works, Revolting Rhymes is incredibly strange and even disturbing, but often a whole lot of fun. Still: Dahl takes fairy tales to another level in Revolting Rhymes, creating a bloodbath out of Cinderella’s romance, making Little Red Riding Hood a stone-cold killer, and saddling Snow White with seven gambling-addict dwarfs. This makes sense, since Dahl’s stories already borrow so much from fairy-tale tropes almost all of his children’s stories involve neglected kids, villainous hags, and/or impossibly magical creatures. But the author’s singsong retellings of six famous fairy tales - with all the grotesque details Disney left out - provide an apt showcase for his twisted sense of humor. What was Dahl thinking? - Aja Romano 9) Revolting Rhymes (1982)Ī collection of rhyming poems, Revolting Rhymes isn’t a "typical" Dahl book. By the time the Vermicious Knids come along, you’re rooting for the aliens to win and wishing Charlie were still mooning by the chocolate river. Charlie’s two loving grandmothers from the previous book are abruptly transformed at the beginning of this one into unbearable, demonized examples of every shallow human trait Dahl can think to burden them with. Moving the action as far away from Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory as possible, Dahl puts his heroes, Charlie Bucket and Willy Wonka, in a great glass elevator for what amounts to an epic road (space) trip with Charlie’s whole family, complete with all the long-suffering "are we there yet?" moments such a description implies.īut Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator also contains scathing, largely clichéd diatribes against US politics, including a weirdly infantilized look at the US president. Speaking of bitterness, there was no shortage of it on display in the sequel to Dahl’s most famous and most-beloved book.
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Constance Grady 10) Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972) Add to that the sheer bitterness of the premise, and you have one of Dahl’s most uneven works. Yeah, that solving-world-hunger angle comes out of nowhere at the end, as does the rest of the story’s not-exactly-resolution. Which, George’s father proclaims, means George has effectively solved world hunger! It makes her grow, becoming unimaginably large.
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Gleefully he mixes together curry powder and shampoo and antifreeze and other substances he finds lying around the house - but when he feeds it to his grandmother, it doesn’t have quite the effect he had in mind.
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So George decides to shake her up he makes her a dose of medicine. She forces her 8-year-old grandson to make her endless cups of tea and eat cabbage riddled with bugs. George’s grandmother has a puckered mouth and teeth stained pale brown.