The Witches by Roald Dahl

ISBN: 0590032496

I bought this book.

The Witches is one of my favorites, a hold over from my independent reader days. In fact it’s the same copy of Roald Dahl’s classic that I bought as a budding reader that I read to my kids this past October. Don’t be fooled, this is a kid’s book that’s genuinely scary and isn’t going to tack on a happily ever after ending for our valiant heroes.

Imagine a creature that looks like a woman, but is actually an evil paranormal beastie bent on the utter destruction of children. And witches don’t just kill kids (that’s for people who get caught, Dahl assures us) they turn them into animals to be slaughtered for meat, or hex them into painting to live out their natural lives in oils. The Witches is one part absurd and two parts very scary.

After his parents dies tragically our hero lives with his grandmother, who used to be a witch hunter and takes his witch education very seriously. Yet somehow, on vacation, our hero manages to stumble right into the annual meeting of the witches and end up the only living non-witch who has seen the Grand High Witch true face to face. They’ve hatched a plan to turn all the children of England into mice and only a ten year old boy and an eighty year old woman can stop them before it’s too late.

You could say that the whole premise is Dahl’s hatred of women (especially women who don’t want/like kids), but I think that like in his other stories (almost all of which on the kid’s shelves deal with extraordinary kids facing really abusive adults) Dahl taps into one of the universal terrors of the early years. Even cared for and supported childhood is a dangerous time when a person has no real control over their life and where adults try to say there’s no danger when there’s a ton.

In The Witches, like Dahl’s other books, the power is put into the hands of the children characters to either let life crush them, or chase after their dreams any way.

I recommend The Witches for an older audience (eight or so and up) and despite its uncomfortable touches of scary, recommend it as an essential part of a library-in-progress.

Also, there’s a movies version (with a different ending) starring Angelica Huston and filmed with the held of Henson’s Muppet Studio (for effects, not muppets) that’s worth checking out as well.