Amanda's Reviews > Matilda

I didn't grow up reading Dahl, just as a forewarning to this review.

When I read children's and YA fiction, I look closely at the messages being sent to the reader. In Matilda, I picked up on the suggestion that people's character is represented by their appearance. Fat and ugly people are neglectful and/or abusive (as seen in the characters of Miss Trunchbull and The Wormwoods). The main "good" characters - Matilda, Miss Honey and Lavender - are all described as small or thin and Matilda's limerick of Miss Honey establishes her teacher as also very pretty. Even Hortencia is thin, though the boil on her nose ties into her pranks at school. Bruce is fat, but he's also short, being a child, and he uses his fatness to defeat Miss Trunchbull by gorging himself on cake. I found that over and over again the story was accidentally (I hope) telling the reader that ugly and fat people are going to be cruel and thin, small people will be kind. This is so wrong.

Apart from the problems I had with the characters I thought the ending to the story was way too abrupt. There needed to be another chapter to wrap up with the characters. It felt like my book was missing pages.

Quentin Blake's illustrations are not my favourite, so that didn't help my reading experience, either.

The only thing I really enjoyed about this story were the handful of literary references, but that wasn't enough to bump this read up to three stars. I really wish I could have enjoyed this more, but I don't think I'll be reading this to my kids and that's never a good thing to say about a children's book.