Matilda by Roald Dahl

I vividly remember reading Matilda for the first time in one sitting while my dad shopped a plant sale for hours. Even at 9 years old, I appreciated its absurdity and dark humor. Roald Dahl is a popular author because he frequently writes stories where the children triumph over the brutish, inattentive adults in their lives and Matilda is no exception.

Matilda is a modern fairy tale and its title character is the perfect heroine. Matilda Wormwood is kind and brilliant and unassuming. Her parents are a combination of the "Dursleys" from Harry Potter and the stepsisters from Cinderella. At the age of 1 1/2, Matilda has the vocabulary of an adult, though her parents refer to her as a "noisy chatterbox" and tell her that children should be "seen and not heard." When Matilda reads The Secret Garden, Great Expectations and Jane Eyre at the age of 4, her parents encourage her to watch more TV. “There's nothin' you can get from a book that you can't get from a television fastah!" says Mr. Wormwood.

Because Matilda never fully harnesses her extreme intellect she develops telekinetic abilities. She then uses this new-found ability to redeem her sweet teacher Miss Honey by terrifying the nightmarish headmistress Miss Trunchbull. Miss Trunchbull is a former hammer-throwing champion, able to hurl a child across the playground in a single throw. Illustrator, Quentin Blake captures this moment marvelously.

Matilda is available at our library in a variety of formats and adaptations including: paperback (J/DAH), Spanish (SPANISH/J/DAH) and audio book (J/DAH/YS/DISC ). There is also a 1996 movie starring Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman (ARTS&LIT/MATIL/YS) and a musical called "Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical" (MUSICALS/MATILDA).