Product Description

Five-year old Matilda longs for her parents to be good and loving and understanding, but they are none of these things. They are perfectly horrid to her. Matilda invents a game of punishing them each time they treat her badly and she soon discovers she has supernatural powers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8233 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
After some autobiographical excursions, Dahl here returns to the sort of whimsically grotesque fantasy that makes grown-ups wince and children beg for more. His heroine is five-year-old Matilda, a genius whose mathematical abilities, as well as her impressive reading list (Hemingway, Steinbeck, etc.), are totally unappreciated by her father - a dishonest used-car salesman - and her mother, a devotee of bingo and TV soaps. Only when the girl enters school does she find an understanding ally, Miss Honey, a paragon of virtue who attempts to defend her pupils against unbelievably cruel headmistress Miss Trunchbull, who hates children in direct proportion to their youth and tortures them accordingly. Just when things seem to be at their worst, Matilda discovers still another gift, telekinesis, enabling her to defeat the horrible Trunchbull and give Miss Honey, and herself, a new start. Dahl's tightly woven plots, his strict sense of absolute justice, and his raunchy "funny bits" make him popular with children who also appreciate the empowerment he grants to his smaller, weaker protagonists. Matilda is the most simplistic of his efforts in this direction, but it does retain the time-honored appeal, abetted by Blake's apt illustrations. It probably should be marked "For Children Only," though. And Dahl slips badly when he says that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien have no "funny bits" in their books. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
Five-year old Matilda longs for her parents to be good and loving and understanding, but they are none of these things. They are perfectly horrid to her. Matilda invents a game of punishing them each time they treat her badly and she soon discovers she has supernatural powers.

About the Author
Roald Dahl, the best-loved of children's writers, was born in Wales of Norwegian parents. After school in England he went to work for Shell in Africa. He began to write after "a monumental bash on the head", sustained as an RAF pilot in World War II. Roald Dahl died in 1990.

Customer Reviews

Not same cover but still a great book, one of the best!
Plot: Matilda is an intelligent little girl who can read and has been reading before she could walk! Her parents are mean to him; she is a genius but they are the stupid ones. Matilda has been dreaming about school and when she finally does go it is half a nightmare...

An amazing fact about the book connected with the author: Roald Dahl imagined being a child an again when he wrote Matilda.

Another cool comment about the book: Matilda won the Children's Book Award in 1988 and was voted most popular in 1999 on World Book Day that year!

Rating and recommendation: 7/ 10; to all Roald Dahl fans.

One of my favourite childrens' books
I read Matilda many times in primary school because I found it exciting, funny, and empowering. It teaches children that they can be clever without being a goody goody, or forsaking modesty. It also teaches children that if they are clever enough then they will develop special abilities, though perhaps not quite the same ones that Matilda has!

matilda magic
Matilda powers are very exiting & funny we will recamend it to enywhon how
can read.Have you herd about the bit where Matilda uses her powers on the Princeable. It was very good. We enjoyed it to bits.
by Mariyah and Daanish