The Witches

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.