The Witches

Dahl at his best. Reading in 2018 and post-Harry Potter, I did find it was a little negative on women being the only witches. Why not warlocks? But that's cultural PC crap intruding into my brain - I'd prefer to push it out. The book is great. I'd say 8+ is ideal.

We bought this to listen to on a road trip and it’s awful! The accent makes it hard for children to understand and they go from whispering to screaming. My son is 8 and he liked this book when I read it to him but he was frustrated with the audiobook

I first read this book when I was in the third grade, 25 years ago. I instantly decided then that it was my favorite book and I read and re-read it many times. I loved it. I recently took on a research project involving children's and young adult stories and have a long reading list of Children's stories to read - I put "The Witches" at the top of my list for nostalgia's sake, not sure what to expect.As an adult, I can report, that it is simply a magnificent story. I can see why I loved it so much as a child. Dahl never dismisses the reader (children) as being inept. Like the Grandmother in the story, Dahl knows children don't require extreme coddling. He's not timid about using fear to tell a great story.Parent's strive to create a safe world for their children. But that illusion is one that all parents must slowly deconstruct to prepare children for reality. Fairy tales are an integral part of that deconstruction. In fairy tales, monsters can exist in a way that allows children face their fears and walk through those fears to the other side where strength, courage and confidence are found."The Witches" is a frightening, yet thrilling read for children. Dahl is a masterful storyteller and in "The Witches" he has weaved imagination, fear and courage into a fantastically fun story that has stood the test of time and remains refreshingly relevant for each generation.

Any full-length novel by Roald Dahl (we've read almost all of them) is going to be excellent, a mixture of zaniness, intelligence, and wonder. Here we have the familiar contrast of appalling or even evil adults alongside much friendlier and more sympathetic ones, with the hapless child thrown into weird and frightening situations and bravely plunging in.

Grandmother tells her grandson how to recognize a witch, what he should do if he sees one, how he can avoid being taken by a witch. The grandson listens carefully and keeps watch. She almost makes me believe there are witches. The grandson does have an encounter with not one witch but an entire conference room full of them. He is turned into a mouse. He is a clever boy and is able to escape. Instead of being depressed that he is now a mouse, he and grandma hatch a plan to put the witches out of business for good. He is the one with the ideas and Grandma is always amazed at his cleverness and helps him carry out his plan.Another boy was also changed into a mouse. His parents are disgusted by him now that he is a mouse. Grandma is very sad that his parents don't love him just because he's a mouse. But Grandma continues to be loving and considerate. She re arranges the house so her grandson/mouse can be safe and independent. She carries him in her purse when they go out. The adventure with the witches is funny and clever but the real story was in the tenderness between Grandmother and Grandson. As the boy/mouse considers his new reality he asks her how long a mouse would live. She is honest as well as hopeful. A mouse does not live as long as a boy would. But he isn't an ordinary mouse so he will live longer than an ordinary mouse.I liked Roald Dahl before but this book sealed him as one of my favorite authors.

Scary story of a little boy and his grandmama off on vacation at a seaside resort that is also hosting a convention of English witches, the really bad kind. They intend to turn all the English children into mice and kill them. The boy and grandmama have to team up to thwart the witches evil intentions.

My 8, almost 9, year old likes this book. My 6 year old only listened the first time I read and now she is a bit scared by it. I started off reading them James and the Giant Peach, which they both loved so much! I thought we would try another by Dahl, but we might wait another year or two before we start it again.

When my 4th grade teacher read this to our class, it lit a fire under a few of us, and we started reading everything we could get our hands on after that.I'm now reading it to my daughter and she is LOVING it.

What a delightful and wickedly funny book! Ostensibly about scary witches that kill children, Roald Dahl has written a classic heartwarming story of the bond between a newly-orphaned boy, who is strangely never given a name (I didn’t even realise that until I pored through the book again to find his name) and his Grandmama, from Norway. The fact that neither the boy nor Grandmama is named makes the story even more magical on hindsight, because this could be a story about just any boy and his grandmother, giving it an Everyman feel to this tale.Grandmama’s country of origin is important because Grandmama has stories to tell about her girlhood experiences of witches growing up there, Norway being some sort of high witch grand central. The premise behind her stories is to distract him from his sadness of losing his parents. This is marvellously dealt with because Grandmama’s stories sound almost too fantastical to be true until they return to Bournemouth, England, to honour the boy’s father’s will. There, the boy finds out first hand that witches are real, and that they are just as Grandmama has described them, innocuously like any other woman on the street except for their gloves that hide their claws, bald heads under wigs, strange eyes, and toeless square feet hidden in pointy shoes. And they are all out to rid the world of pesky children, who smell like dog poo to them.I can see where David Walliams got his inspiration from in his equally engaging and endearing “Gangsta Granny”, but Dahl still wins hands-down for integrating all the elements of horror, the macabre and magical, together with the bravery of the boy and the love between him and Grandmama, the latter who never ever flinches or talks down to the boy the way you expect an adult to when speaking to her grandson, even when he is literally turned into a mouse by the wicked Grand High Witch.An altogether lovely story to savour, and I’m glad I found the time to read it for the first time in my mellow adulthood, and still be able to appreciate the magic of it.

I chose this rating because I like books about magic and adventure.I liked the bit where the narrator was peeking through the screen in a hotel named Hotel Magnificent and saw the witches run their private RSPCC( Royal Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Children)meeting.I disliked the bit when Bruno the mouse, the narrator's best friend, died of old age. It was devastating and almost impossible to believe! I didn't like that bit.On the other hand, I love this book and would recommend that anyone who likes magic and adventure books to read it.

My wife remembers this book from her childhood as being her favourite book so she bought it for our 7-year-old daughter and we read it over several nights. My daughter also liked it and said it was "really fun".The story starts with the unnamed boy narrator (at the beginning where the main characters are introduced he is simply called "boy") being told about witches by his grandmama. But "this is not a fairy-tale" she is telling. "This is about REAL WITCHES" and "real witches hate children." They disguise themselves as women and make children disappear.The grandmother is funny because she is so un-grandma-like as she puffs away on her black cigar.After that bout of story-telling the book sees the boy come into contact with real witches. Not just one witch though as he gets stuck in a room with about 200 of them. He has to hide but witches can smell children out, and do just that. This is where the real witching begins and the dastardly things they do comes to the fore.All-in-all a classic Roald Dahl tale with the scary enemy potentially being anywhere, hence a child's imagination running wild.

This book has been read and reviews thousands of times but how can you not love Roald Dahls book? This is fantastic and I won't go into it because there are very few people who don't know the story already but if you don't get too it!!!The Paperback - It has seen many different covers and this one is just a good as any of the others, Quentin Blake still attracts children who seem to be able to reckoning his work anywhere. The print is of good side and well looks good on the shelf!The Audio Book - Have listened to many different versions over the years the most recent being Miranda Richardson but no one did this as well as Simon Callow. With his you just loose yourself in the story and his take on the Witches song 'Oh where have all the children gone' is hilarious! The only downside it's abridged where the newer Miranda Richardson version is unabridged but I would still pick Callow's version ever time.Kindle - The same as the paperback just quicker to download it if you children are demanding to read it as mine were. illustrations are just as great, a couple of typos but nothing the drastic. Maybe being an older book now it could be a little cheaper for the ebook but worth every penny none the less.

My 6 year old daughter loves roald Dahl and so far together we have read Charlie and the chocolate factory, James and the giant peach and The twits. We have also started reading Matilda as well as this book. A firm bedtime favourite in our house.