James and the Giant Peach

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EP 7: Yo-Yo Ma, Billy Porter, Cynthia Erivo, Jamie Cullum & Utkarsh Ambudkar read w/ Taika! #WithMe I liked the more macabre elements of the story like the oddly sinister Cloud-Men and the “immense grey batlike creature swooping down towards them out of the dark” - Quentin Blake’s drawing really sells them too. The batlike creature is a really weird inclusion as it has no bearing on the plot and is never mentioned again. But that kind of strange detail is partly why you re-read as you notice stuff you didn’t the first time!

So why, you may wonder, are you going on reading this author if you know he is despicable? Two reasons: one, Quentin Blake (the illustrator), and two... I have to admit... deep down... I still love good ol' mean Roal Dahl 😈 This book is pure nostalgia, a nod to my earlier years of life when I was absolutely in love with the movie version. It was my second childhood favorite film of Tim Burton’s, the first being Nightmare Before Christmas! I don’t know if it’s because I saw the movie first and it’s so near and dear to my heart, but I’d have to say the movie is slightly better than the book. It could also be the differences between the two? Despite that though, I still really enjoyed getting lost in the book. It was a fun adventure! Roald Dahl was a British novelist, short story writer and screenwriter of Norwegian descent, who rose to prominence in the 1940's with works for both children and adults, and became one of the world's bestselling authors.

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On a more hopeful note, the underlying message of this story is that there are ways to escape a troubling homelife. The verbal and emotional abuse James receives is a bit over-the-top, but that might be the reality for some kids. How do they escape that? And while they can't fly away on a giant peach, ultimately, this story suggests that abused kids can find possible escapes through friends and writing. That the power of relationships and creativity and imagination are all a person needs to take them anywhere they want to go i.e. it shows kids that no matter how bad things may seem, or how bad they get, there is always hope. Meet James, a young fella who lives with his ugly aunts who are fat and ugly. Did I mention one of them is fat? Yeah, I mean Roal Dhal loves to make fun of big people- also blind people - but I digress. James is walking alone one day when he meets a suspicious individual who suggests he gets some suspicious items he is giving him and eats them; if he does so, magical things will happen. Marvelous things, indeed. Kids, make fun of fat people by creating funny rhymes and get lots of candy from strangers! Magical things will happen if you do so! Like getting inside a giant peach with a bunch of giant bugs who are mean to each other and to everybody else, just as much as the aunts are mean, James is mean, literally everybody is mean. I never read kids books with such horrible messages like Dahl's. A chance encounter with a slightly creepy and definitely odd (and quite frankly, suspiciously pedophilic if the quotes are taken out of context) old man leads to a new sort of adventure: Come right up close to me and I will show you something wonderful.James is gifted with a bag of pure magic. Only he manages to spoil his chance at happiness by spilling the bag...

Recently I joined the Banned Books group and one of the group reads for this month was James and the Giant Peach. I'm sure there are many GR readers who have read a Roald Dahl book and/or seen a movie adaptation of one of his books. If you have, then you would know that Dahl has consistently written stories that entertain children with morals and life lessons that even adults can appreciate. Usually, if I don't care for a book, I keep schtum about it here. Not only is it not as much fun to talk about books I didn't like, but bad-mouthing other author's books is pretty rude. The plot centers on a young English orphan boy who enters a gigantic, magical peach, and has a wild and surreal cross-world adventure with seven magically-altered garden bugs he meets. A lot of the characters were unmemorable - besides the Centipede and the Earthworm nobody really has a personality and those two weren’t exactly very likeable either! Oh and I haaaated the tedious songs that kept cropping up - it was like reading bloody Tolkien again!Jones, Kenneth (21 October 2010). " James and the Giant Peach, the Musical, Blossoms with the Help of Pilobolus, Oct. 21". Playbill . Retrieved 12 September 2016. Quentin was the inaugural Children's Laureate (1999-2001), an experience he recorded in his book Laureate's Progress. During his time in the role, he celebrated children's books and children's book illustration with a range of projects and exhibitions, and conceived the idea for the House of Illustration, the world's first centre dedicated to the art of illustration in all its forms.