The Witches

When it comes to children's classics, nobody does it better than the incomparable Roald Dahl. ‘The Witches' is a story about real witches, none of that broomstick-riding rubbish. Nor are there any black cloaks and pointy hats in the picture.

In fact, witches look like perfectly nice, ordinary ladies... except that they are out to get rid of children.

The book tells us within the first few pages: “A real witch gets the same pleasure from squelching a child as you get from eating a plateful of strawberries and thick cream.”

It also lists down how to identify a witch: they are always women. They wear gloves to hide their clawed fingers. They have no toes. They wear wigs. The rims of their nostrils are pink and curvy. Their spit is blue. In fact, they use it as ink. The next time you see someone lick the nib of their pen, you better steer clear.

When an orphan boy finds himself trapped in a room full of witches during the Witches Annual Meeting, he becomes one of the first to fall under the Grand High Witch's latest scheme to rid the world of children. The grandly-named Formula 86 Delayed Action Mouse-Maker will turn the little brats into mice, which will then be killed by their own horrified and unknowing parents.

The boy survives the encounter, and takes his transformation into a mouse in stride. His grandmother does too, since she's Norwegian and they take things like this better then the English.

Although his grandmother is a witchophile (a person who studies witches), she could not reverse the spell set upon him. However, the both of them are quick to take advantage of the situation and hatch a plan to rid the world of children-hating witches.

Dahl is wonderfully descriptive and delightfully wicked with his prose. Children smell like dog's droppings to witches after the have a bath? I can see kids using this as an excuse not to take a bath. (Don't worry, kids. Witches aren't real... hehehe.)

(2006)

I've definitely read this before as a kid but I couldn't recall as much of it as I can with some of Roald Dahl's other more iconic works, so I had to revisit this one again. It was... definitely a trip.

There were a lot of dated concepts in here which is probably not unique to this particular title amongst Dahl's children's books, and I know there's already a debate about how much of this should be “updated” or not, so I won't touch on that bit.

Overall though, this was interesting to me comparing how I read this book as a kid vs how I read it now as an adult. Nothing much about the plot fazed me as a kid, and I thought it was just a pretty fun adventure of a boy and his grandma plotting against and fighting witches. As an adult that hasn't revisited this book in a while, I was incredibly surprised that we were reading all these as children and it was perfectly OK. It made me think about the immense capacity for children to take in some pretty violent concepts and sort of digest it into a natural part of life and the world. Dahl had the excuse of publishing this in the early 80s, but 100% for sure we won't see a children's book like this being written today.