Please feel free to read the below reviews IF you have already read Factory, Fox, Witches, and Danny. If you have not read these, please read them! Dahl is required reading for all MWLS students!
Chloe’s Roald Dahl Collection
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator:
Being old and close minded, the group of grandparents (not Grandpa Joe of course) caused lots of trouble, well… Grandma Josephine caused the most.
Grandma Josephine, feeling as if Wonka was “whackers” and a “maniac” and a “madman” proceeded to hold Mr. Wonka back as he tried to press the green button that would send them down to earth from terrifying heights straight through the glass roof of his chocolate factory (hopefully, if they didn’t accidentally land somewhere else) before they went too far and launched into orbit. But because of Grandma Josephine’s stubbornness about Wonka, and her determination to hold him down, he was unable to get to the button in time, launching them into orbit (coincidentally on the same day that the transport capsule for the Space Hotel U.S.A was in the air) where they met all types of things including possibly the worst animal on earth (worse than the honey badger may I add, way worse) the… Vermicious Knids!!
Imagine looking at a glass elevator flying in the middle of the air with eight very odd and frail looking passengers inside, three still in bed, one dressed in lots of colors and an incredibly large top hat, two people looking like a couple huddled close together, a young boy who looked alive with excitement, and a old person looking in the 90s who was alive with the same excitement on his face, well that’s how the three astronauts, Shuckworth, Shank and Showler felt staring at the great glass elevator in space. And such oddness immediately sent these three in frenzy, calling Ground Control in Houston and soon the president.
Now you see, The President, Lancelot R. Gilligrass, may not really be up to the leadership needed in such a crisis – if you really are looking for some advice, then go to the vice president, Miss Tibbs, but you might want to be careful because she’s a scary one! Miss Tibbs is a rather large lady of 89 and was actually the President’s nurse when he was a baby; as Roald Dahl put it, she “was the power behind the throne”. The President, upon hearing this news of such an odd thing flying in the air, immediately jumped to the conclusion that these were foreign people and they were planning to bomb the Space Hotel (he thought that the bomb was disguised as the bed that we all know the grandparents have been lying on for the past 20 years!) The tension in the White House and in the transport capsule was only worsened when Willy Wonka, Grandpa Joe, and Charlie maneuvered the magnificent glass elevator to land on the Space Hotel itself.
The Space Hotel is a truly jaw-dropping sight, much like the Porcelain Pagoda of Miss Bianca, and though it should have been a very enjoyable visit, it was unfortunately cut short when those Vermicious Knids appeared in the elevator door, as they were so deathly that even Wonka was frozen on his feet.
Vermicious Knids are “the terror of the universe” and they look like an egg only squeezed slightly out of proportions with the top rather round and big and the bottom pointy and small. Some might even say they look cute in some aspects, but they are quite the opposite. Extremely flexible (that should be expected as they have no bones) they can stretch and change into any shape their heart desires. They are so dangerous that they can just sit there, 50 yards away from you, relaxing and then suddenly they just stretch their necks gulping you down in one breath. As Wonka put it, “[We]’ll be eaten like peanuts”. For, long, long ago, there was a nice, kind, friendly group called Poozas that were living on the moon, but then this deadly, ruthless, animal, known as the Vermicious Knids came and ate all of them, and they proceeded to do this on many other planets, traveling through the solar system in great clumps. We would have been dead if there wasn’t a nice layer of air and gas surrounding our planet earth, so I think we should all take a moment to thank this lovely layer of air and gas which is the only reason we are all alive today!
You know how you might see a shooting star here and there? Well, this might come as a surprise to you (just like they came as a rather shock to Grandma Georgina) but these shooting stars are actually shooting Knids that are trying to break through our air and gas barrier… only they are not able to and instead end up in red hot flames! What you learned in science class about asteroids, meteors and satellites is dead wrong: they’re just flaming Knids.
As you might have already figured out, the poor people in the transport capsule are going to have quite a shock (though they might not have time to process it before they are gulped up) when they enter the majestic Space Hotel only to find creepy creatures: the Vermicious Knids. And this is exactly what happens.
During the time the transport capsule was landing on the Space Hotel, the glass elevator had an odd companion, a Vermicious Knid, strolling along, as the elevator sped on ahead (that Knid had no problem following since it usually goes way faster than this to travel throughout the solar system) around the earth. Charlie, Grandpa Joe and Willy Wonka are determined to help save the many passengers aboard the transport capsule and therefore attach a steel rope to the transport capsule and the elevator so that they could tow them back to earth! You may be wondering about the chink in this plan, how was the elevator supposed to survive these attacks by the Vermicious Knids? well… being the genius man Willy Wonka is, he obviously built this elevator to withstand Knid attacks. As he put it, this elevator is “Knidproof”.
Towing the transport capsule the great glass elevator flew back to earth, the Knids were trying to stop this from happening by hooking themselves together like a chain, and thankfully our air and gas barrier helped us once again. As the great glass elevator with the transport capsule in tow went through the barrier back into the earth’s atmosphere, all the Knids were turned into shooting Knids, or as most people know them, shooting stars. Just think about what a spectacular sight it would have been if you were looking up from the ground!
Back at Willy Wonka’s factory the grandparents are presented with Wonka Vite!!! One pill will send you back 20 years of your life – for example if you were 50, after taking one of these you would be only 30! Imagine something that powerful! Most, when presented with something extraordinary, become greedy – this usually comes with consequences. Here, the grandparents (not Grandpa Joe) ate too much of the Vite and went too far back, where two grandparents become babies and Grandma Georgina goes to minusland! Thankfully, Wonka had thought ahead. Not only was he the proud inventor of Wonka-Vite, the youth-replenishing pill, but he had an aging pill too, with the logical name: Vita-Wonk. You guessed it: it did the exact opposite. After some hard work everyone returned back to their original ages. Whew, that was a ride!
And perhaps the most shocking miracle is that all grandparents have finally set foot on terra firma after being confined to their rusty old four-poster bed for two decades – when they heard that there was a helicopter in front of the factory ready to take them to President Gilligrass in honor of their heroic move of saving the transport capsule, up they all jumped!
And that’s it! Quite a romp!
Fantastic Mr. Fox:
Three most disgraceful and disgusting farmers you will ever find are the cause of all the trouble that Mr. Fox, his family, and all the other animals who live underground have experienced.
Number one: Farmer Boggis, is an extremely fat chicken farmer who owns thousands of chickens and eats a most disgusting meal of “three boiled chickens smothered with dumplings”. He has a belly that could be used as a table due to his appetite and diet.
Number two: Farmer Bunce, is a “pot-bellied dwarf” is a duck and goose farmer who owns thousands of ducks and geese and also eats extremely disgusting meals of donuts and goose-livers. To make this mess of food, he “mashed the livers into a disgusting paste and then stuffed the paste into donuts”. Due to this horrific combination it resulted in him to have a “beastly temper” and a tummy ache.
Lastly, number three: Farmer Bean, is as thin as a pencil, turkey and apple farmer who has thousands of turkeys and an orchard bursting of apples. He eats no food, instead he drinks “gallons of strong cider which he made from the apples in his orchard”. He also has the nasty habit of never washing, resulting in nearly deaf ears that were clogged with “muck and wax and bits of chewing-gum and dead flies and stuff like that”. Despite that, of the three, he is the smartest.
One family of foxes (Mr. Fox, Mrs. Fox, and four small Foxes) live in hole under a huge tree in the woods on a hill above the valley. Every night, whatever Mrs. Fox wanted to eat from the farms owned by Boggis, Bunce and Bean, Mr. Fox would get. As expected, this enraged the three farmers who “were not men who liked to give anything away” and thus, they wanted their revenge.
Bean, being the smartest out of the three, formulated a plan. They would “hide just outside the hole where the fox lives” and wait until he came out, then with a few “bangs” the fox would be no more. This plan nearly worked, for they were careful to position themselves in a way that the wind would not carry their filthy and grimy smell to the foxes’ waiting noses. But just as Mr. Fox realized that the “glint of something bright” was actually the barrel of a gun, he whipped straight around and launched himself in the hole, sadly, he was unable to escape unscathed. He paid the price of not being careful enough with his “finest tail for miles around”, leaving only the stump of his tail behind, where there would never be another tail.
The farmers, being extremely determined, were unhappy to only have a fox tail as a souvenir, they wanted the whole fox, preferably his family too, so they decided to speed up the process (instead of waiting for the fox to come out after days when he was starving) by digging him out. Soon, the family of foxes who petrified of being killed (who wouldn’t?) could see the “sharp end of the shovel” above them. But thankfully, the title of the book means something, and being the fantastic Mr. Fox that he is, he quickly realized a key detail: “A fox can dig quicker than a man”!! And quickly, without a moment to lose, he started frantically to dig, quickly joined by the rest of his family. Dirt flew everywhere as the front legs of all six foxes were hard at work digging and digging, expanding the tunnel farther and farther down, until they could not hear the “scrunching and scraping” of the shovels anymore. They thought they were safe, but these three farmers were not ready to give up yet.
Boggis, Bunce and Bean had dug a hole so deep you could stick a house in there, and yet they still did not find the foxes and it was quite clear they would be unable to, unless they used mechanical shovels (this was again Bean’s idea). The “two enormous caterpillar trucks with mechanical shovels” were many, many times faster than the farmers, and it “easily ripped the big tree under which Mr. Fox had dug his hole in the first place”.
As Roald Dahl put it, “now there began a desperate race, the machines against the foxes”. As it looked very likely that the machines would win the race, the foxes dug furiously, as fast as they possibly could, so that even after a whole day of digging the mechanical shovels still had not reached the foxes. Instead they had turned the hill into the size of a volcano crater, attracting people from the surrounding villages. After all, it was an extraordinary site!
At six o’clock that day, Bunce and Bean stopped the tractors, still without a sign of the foxes, but they were determined, now more than ever to get that fox hanging on their porch, so they decided to camp out in the crater, until the foxes who would be starving came out. The farmers were sure that sooner or later Mr. Fox would have to come because he and his family needed food and they could shoot them then, which does seem rather logical… if it wasn’t for fantastic Mr. Fox.
The whole fox family was huddled down underground far from Boggis, Bunce and Bean, but they were starving and thirsty, especially Mrs. Fox who “was suffering more than any of them from the lack of food and water” when Mr. Fox came up with a brilliant idea. It required more digging, but the small foxes were willing to give it a try, and so they headed off.
They had to dig in a very specific way to reach their first destination, but the little foxes following their fathers instruction managed perfectly. After a long, weary while of digging, Mr. Fox claimed that they had reached their destination. Slowly they angled their digging up, until they came to wooden planks! Had Mr. Fox, along with the four small foxes really achieved it? Yes, in fact they had! Mr. Fox, cautiously pushed up one floorboard, and then another, and he took a peek. “He let out a shriek of excitement”! And started dancing, yelling “I’ve done it! I’ve done it!”. Soon, the four small foxes climbed up and joined him and they couldn’t believe their eyes. Where had all their digging brought them? The Boggis’s Chicken House Number One!! This was pure joy to see chicken after chicken, and Mr. Fox carefully chose three plump chickens and killed them quickly (hopefully it was a painless death!) Back in the tunnel, Mr. Fox sent the eldest of his four children to bring back the three plump chickens to their mother to cook into a feast, as the rest of them had a “few other little arrangements” to tend to. Can you guess where they went next??
Mr. Fox and three of his children started digging once again, this time to another very specific location and on the way they met a familiar friend! BADGER!!!
Badger wasn’t quite happy about Mr. Fox, as he was the reason that all the diggers couldn’t get out to get food. But he was soon delighted when he heard about the feast Mrs. Fox was preparing (and the fact that Mr. Fox wasn’t teasing him about that) and helped them dig, where they soon arrived at… Bunce’s Mighty Storehouse, filled with “thousands and thousands of the finest and fattest ducks and geese” and “at least a hundred smoked hams and fifty sides of bacon”!!! From here, Mr. Fox chose “four plump young ducks”, three geese, “a couple of nice smoked hams”, a side of bacon, 10 carrots for the rabbits who only eat vegetables, and two “useful pushcarts”. And sent two out of the three remaining small foxes, each to push a pushcart to Mrs. Fox to add to the growing feast.
Mr. Fox, one of his kids, and Badger continued digging to their last destination. And very soon, Badger hit a wall made of bricks. Mr. Fox carefully examined the wall and popped a brick out, which was met with a mad rat, who was not happy to have Mr. Fox interrupting his private place. But Mr. Fox threatened to eat him, and gulping with fear he jumped right out of the way. Inside the brick wall, they found Bean’s Secret Cider Cellar filled with jars upon jars of the strong cider. They were enjoying a sip of that strong, “home brewed fiery liquor” when they heard a voice. There was a “huge woman” coming down to the cellar, and instantly Mr. Fox yelled to everyone to hide. The group was tense as they crouched behind some of the jars of cider. Mabel (the huge woman) who was taking some jars to be brought to Bean who was still camping in the huge crater waiting for the appearance of the foxes took the jar right next to the one Mr. Fox was crouching behind. Mabel took another one, and paused to ask Mrs. Bean if two was enough. Mrs. Bean really didn’t care (it seemed like she was rather impatient) and so Mabel only took two. We should all be very thankful that Mrs. Bean didn’t ask for three, because that would have been the one Mr. Fox was taking cover behind. After that very close call, Mabel walked out, and Mr. Fox told everyone to take one jar of that strong cider. 
While up above, in that volcano crater Boggis, Bunce and Bean were still sitting there waiting, unaware of the fun the foxes and all the other animals were having under them, and to make it worse for them, it had also started to rain (it looks like Mother Nature was on the foxes side!).
The Witches:
Which of the above Witches appeal to you?
Witches are… how do I put this… are the worst creatures to roam the earth. They are not the ones that you dress up as for Halloween, with the pointed hat, and broomstick. The real witches are much scarier. Why is that? Because they look just like regular ladies when they have their disguises on, so you can’t know whether she is a witch… or an innocent young lady. These witches can easily turn a child into a slug, who will probably be stepped on by someone random… if not your very own parents. The first terrifying example would be simply just vanishing. A witch comes up to you, dressed like a lady with gloves and everything, and takes your hand and you are never seen again. No matter how hard everyone looks, they never find you!
Terrifying example number two is to end up in an oil painting with no way out. Poor Solveg’s dad found out the hard way that his daughter was just “simply a part of the painting, just a picture painted on the canvas.” And to make things worse, you will actually move in the painting and as more days pass, the older you will look in the oil painting. Another horrifying example would be getting turned into a chicken. Birgit Svenson “started growing feathers all over her body. Within a month, she had turned into a large white chicken.” And these are just some examples. The witches have powers that we do not, and they can get rid of you in many different ways, so WATCH OUT!!!
Witches HATE children. To them, children smell like dogs’ droppings, and their biggest desire is to get rid of every single child in the world. In fact, that’s exactly what they were planning to do if the boy and his grandmother had not stepped in and saved the day. Now kids, even though you are probably trembling in fear right now, there is a way to spot a witch. It is not a hundred percent foolproof, but it’s better than nothing. Six signs that this person is actually a witch:
Number one! Witches always wear gloves. In the hottest days of summer and the coldest days of winter, and every day in between, they wear gloves. They wear it inside their house. The only time they take it off is when they go to bed. Why? To hide what is really under there. It is not fingers but claws, and if they didn’t wear gloves it would be quite obvious that they are witches.
Number two! Witches are BALD!! They are “bald as a boiled egg” but obviously they can’t walk around bald, so they buy “first class” wigs. Only these wigs are very bothersome to a bald head as they are extremely itchy. You see, if we were to wear wigs, it would be on top of our own hair, but for witches, the rough underside of the wig would be directly touching her scalp. Ooof, that doesn’t sound good! And because of this, a witch will constantly be scratching her head, kind of like as if she has lice.
Number three! Witches have bigger nose holes than normal people. As the grandmother put it, “The rim of each nose-hole is pink and curvy, like the rim of a certain kind of sea-shell”. And these abnormal-sized nosed holes are used to smell children out. In fact, the cleaner you are, the easier the “stink-waves” come wafting out of you. If you were to be covered in dirt, it would be harder for these stink-waves to come wafting out and into the witches’ large nostrils. So kids, you can now march to your parents and tell them that you are only going to wash once a month at most, so that these witches don’t smell you out.
Number four! Witches have different eyes. You know that black dot you see in the middle of your eye when you look in the mirror? Well, if it is actually a witch that black dot won’t stay black… instead, it will change colors. As Roald Dahl put it, “you will see fire and you will see ice dancing right in the very center of the colored dot”. If someone’s black dot keeps changing colors, chances are, you have just met a witch!!!
Number five! Witches DON’T HAVE TOES!! Their feet are basically squares. If you were ever unlucky enough to meet a witch without her shoes, you would see that it looked as if someone got an ax and chopped off all her toes. Sadly this isn’t very helpful if you were trying to spot a witch, as they will be wearing regular human shoes. Just imagine how uncomfortable that is: to squeeze a square foot into a small pointy shoe. But the witches are willing to bear the discomfort, as long as they get at least a child a week, after all their motto is “one child a week is fifty-two a year. Squish them and squiggle them and make them disappear”.
And lastly, number six! Witches have… BLUE spit. Their spit is like ink and that’s exactly how they use it. Witches use “those old-fashioned pens that have nibs and they simply lick the nib”. If you were talking to a witch, you might see that their teeth have a bluish tint. If so, run the other way as quick as you can!
Well, these are all the signs of a witch! I hope that you will never encounter one as long as you live, but just to be safe, smother yourself in dirt!! And if you do encounter one, let’s just hope you come out alright. Hopefully not in an oil painting, or as a mouse, though that wouldn’t be too bad, just think of Miss Bianca and Bernard!
Danny The Champion of the World:
Poaching, (hunting illegally) is considered horrible, something that we would never think about doing, but there might be an exception here where the foul, atrocious, Victor Hazell, who raises these pheasants just to be killed by fancy, rich people with a long title, and the duo, Danny and his dad, are concerned.
Poaching is a dangerous sport where you master the art of “going up into the woods in the dead of night and coming back with something for the pot”. This is a sport where you often end up with a back full of bullet scars that look like dirty snowflakes, or worse, caught and sent to jail. But it also contains a thrill that nothing else can offer, which makes it so appealing to some people. Poaching pheasants without the guards catching you requires a certain amount of cleverness. That’s where two secret methods that Danny’s grandfather came up with himself come into play! The most important secret that you must know about pheasants is… they are “crazy about raisins”!
And with that in mind here is method number one, called the Horse Hair Stopper! This method is so brilliant because the pheasants don’t make any noise – none of that usual “squawking or flapping” that will get you caught! All you have to do is take a few raisins and soak them in water overnight, which will give you some “plump and soft and juicy” raisins, and then you cut a bit of “good stiff” horse hair into half-inch lengths. You slide these horsehairs into the raisins so that there is a little bit sticking out on each side, and you are set and ready to go catch some pheasants! The reason this works so well is that it will get caught in the pheasant’s throat like a crumb in ours and tickles them and then after that, the pheasant will never move again!! Shocking, right?!
Method number two is called the Sticky Hat! All you have to do is dig a small hole into the ground, twist a piece of paper into the shape of a cone, put it into the hole so that it looks like a cup, smear the inside of the cup with glue, pop a few raisins in and also drop a few raisins near it to make a raisin trail! Then a pheasant will come to gobble up the raisins and because of the glue the hat will get stuck on its head and cover its eyes! Once that happens, the pheasant won’t even attempt to run away! Like with Horse Hair Stopper, it becomes immobilized – it really is brilliant! Now, you must wait to hear about the third technique which Danny himself came up with. But first, learn more about Danny’s poaching background.
Danny’s mom and dad were caught in the fascination and thrill of this sport. “She came with me every single time until just before you were born. She had to stop then. She just couldn’t run fast enough.” But once Danny is born, and his mother dies, Danny’s father vows to give up poaching until Danny is old enough to be left alone at night. Well, one night Danny’s father is unable to fight that “tremendous longing” to go poaching once more!
Danny happens to wake up that night his father has gone to Hazell’s Woods. He finds himself in a state of panic when he can’t find his father. And when his father does show up, Danny is then introduced to the art of poaching. In fact Danny is fine with his father going poaching as long as he tells Danny first! So the next day, with Danny’s consent, Danny’s father heads off for an evening of poaching. But because he was a little rusty from lack of practice, instead of coming back with a handful of pheasants to feast on, he fell into a ginormous crater that was at least 12 feet deep and 6 feet wide instead, breaking his left ankle when he fell in.
Danny, who was back home in the gypsy caravan worried about why his father was still out when he had said it wouldn’t take long, decides to set out to find him in a Baby Austin, a car that had been delivered to the mechanical shop that his dad owned to get fixed. Calling and calling, he finally found his dad in the ditch injured and worried. Following his dad’s instructions, he went to the Baby Austin to get a rope so that his father could climb to get out. Little by little, hand over hand, Danny’s father slowly climbed his way out of the ditch.
Victor Hazell pays the equivalent to 100 loaves of bread for every pheasant and its care just so that “for one day every year he becomes a big cheese in a little world and even the Duke of So-and-so slaps him on the back and tries to remember his first name when he says goodbye.” What Danny’s father “dearly wants” to accomplish is to make it so that there aren’t any pheasants left on the “big opening-day shoot on October the first”. And this aching desire was how the third method to poaching pheasants is invented: The Sleeping Beauty! You may think that Danny’s father came up with the idea but no, it was indeed Danny himself.
The Sleeping Beauty works like this: you soak the raisins until they swell up nice and big. Then you cut one of the sides of the raisin with a razorblade, dig out a little bit of its middle and pour some sleeping powder into it. Then very carefully you get a needle and thread and sew up the cut you made! And now you have a nice raisin that looks just like any normal raisin, but it is filled with sleeping powder that should easily put to sleep a pheasant. Once, the pheasant is limp and fast asleep all you have to do is go and collect the fat bird!
The more Danny’s father thought about it, the more the idea seemed like it would work, and so they set up a game plan. The next day (Thursday) when Danny’s father was dropping off Danny at school, he would pick up two packets of seedless raisins and that night he would put them in water to soak. Then on Friday Danny would be “suffering from a nasty cold” so he could stay at home and help. All through Friday they would work tirelessly to cut a slit in each raisin, fill it with sleeping powder, and sew it back again, so that at a quarter to six they would be ready to head out!
They sprinkled with care on the forest grounds, and as suspected, the raisin-loving pheasants gobbled them right up. And by the time it kicked in they were all in their roosts sleeping. It was a truly remarkable sight to see limp pheasants dropping out of their trees and onto the ground where they were picked up by Danny and his father. These were brought back to their town and dumped at Mrs. Clipstone’s for the night because the number one rule of poaching is always walk home empty handed so that in case there is a guard there, you will look innocent!
The next day they were delivered to Danny’s house by Mrs. Clipstone, but obviously she didn’t just walk over with a handful of birds; instead she put them in a pram, under a blanket with her son Christopher Clipstone sitting on top. But the sleeping powder is wearing off, as every sleeping powder does, and the pheasants start to fly out of the pram (startling both the baby and Mrs. Clipstone) to the nearby roof of the workshop and the office window.
Then, all of a sudden, Victor Hazell in his fancy Rolls-Royce drives up, turning a shade of scarlet when he sees all the pheasants perched on the roof. He is spitting out horrifying words when Sergeant Samways comes along. And Sergeant Samways who also secretly poached a few pheasants in his time is on Danny’s side, though of course he can’t show that, being a policeman. So, he comes up with an idea of trying to get the pheasants to fly back Mr. Hazell’s land which seems reasonable to Mr. Hazell. The only problem being that the Rolls-Royce was still parked in the middle of the road and in order for the pheasants to get to Mr. Hazell’s land they had to fly over the car. Now, do you guys see a problem in that? Yes, indeed it is a trick – a trick that Mr. Hazell was not smart enough to catch! The pheasants were still too dopey from the sleeping powder to fly properly, so instead of flying over the car, they land on the car, scratching and scuffing the car’s silver paint. This only makes Hazell even madder, and causes him to want to get out of there, so he jumps into his car and drives away! And in the blink of an eye, the pheasants perched on the car seemed to have disappeared, all flying in the opposite direction of the shooting party!! Ahhh, they are smart pheasants after all!
Only six pheasants were left to be feasted on. The only reason they were even there being because these were the greedy pheasants that had been in the bottom of the pram all along. The ones that had eaten waaaayyyy to many raisins and would never wake up again. See kids? Don’t be greedy! Let that be a lesson to everyone!!