Witches, Week of Sept. 25

 This is a Novel for children. It’s a lower reading level and the beginning states that they hope a teacher is reading this for her class. This is the darkest book I have read so far. I would have been scarred if I read this as a child.

It has a parent drowning their child throw in causally. They have a girl who is trapped just have her family wait until she dies. A child being shot and eaten.

It was made in the 1980’s so maybe censorship was more relaxed. Maybe it is because the children were turned into not humans when the murder happens. It’s terrible. The protagonist’s parent die and he is fine with it because he gets to live with his grandmother.  He did not really talk about being upset over the deaths at all. I understand that his parents were not as ‘cool’ as his grandmother but, I would have more than one page about mourning. I don’t even think the grief took up a full page.

It’s really interesting to think that witches are the scary for me because the people that they are based on, in this novel, are just angry old women. It is not as sexist as it sounds because there is also an angry old woman in the novel that we are meant to like. It’s a seat in the right direction. I don’t still have complaints about it.

If a woman if upset that a kid is not misbehaving in a public area, she has the right to be upset. It’s hard to control babies so they don’t count. A five or eight-year-old should not be leaving toys in hotel lobby. It is the parent’s fault.

But, it’s Roald Dahl, the man has a very dark and twisted world view that has to due with adults v. children. It books themed and depiction of witches makes sense looking at his other novels.