She cries and turns white, but she does not faint and she believes her grandson right away when he tells her what happened (126). Her reaction to the fact that her grandson is a mouse is also better than most normal people (126). She does not believe in children taking baths more than once a month, while most grandmothers would probably want their grandchild to take one every night (27). She tells him all about witches kidnapping children (16). While most grandmothers would probably tell nice stories about when they were young, this grandmother does not veil the truth when talking to her grandson. Even the narrator mentions that she is the only grandmother he has ever met that smokes cigars (15). The character of the grandmother in the novel twists the reader’s perception of what a grandmother should be like. This sets the reader at a little bit of unease and almost makes the story seem plausible. The Grand High Witch could be in disguise as any person.
This makes the reader get more into the novel, because it could be about any boy and his grandmother. The lack of a name of the main characters is so obvious that it is almost like the narrator is trying to cover up their identity. The Grand High Witch is referred to as simply that, or sometimes as “your Grandness” by other witches (74). The grandmother is called “my grandmother” or “grandmamma” or “this old lady” by the narrator (12). The boy is referred to as “boy” or “my darling” by his grandmother (14). One interesting element of this story is that most of the main characters are never named. Even though the plot could never happen in real life, the way the boy narrates it makes it almost seem possible. The fact that the main character interacts with the reader draws them into the plot and helps them to become more interested in the story. He tells the reader “this is not a fairy-tale. At the beginning of the book, the boy talks directly to the reader as if he were telling his tale to them in person. The boy (main character) is the person telling the story. This story is told from first person point of view. It takes place in the real world, but the plot could never happen because it is too whimsical. It contains many magical elements, such as witches and talking mice. This inventive story definitely belongs in the fantasy genre. He and his grandmother go back home and dedicate their lives to ridding the world of witches.Īccording to Literature and the Child, fantasy is “imaginative literature distinguished by characters, places, or events that could not happen in the real world” (Galda 16). The boy is left a mouse for the rest of his life, but decides that he is happy with life as a mouse. The grandmother gives Bruno back to his parents. The witches all turn into mice and are chased out of the hotel. Then he goes into the kitchen and dumps it into the witches’ soup. He sneaks into the Grand High Witch’s room and steals some Delayed Action Mouse-Maker. The boy comes up with a plan to put Mouse-Maker into the witches’ food while they are still at the hotel and turn them all into mice. He finds Bruno and they both go on a quest to find the boy’s grandmother.Īfter a dangerous journey to his grandmother’s room, the boy tells her what happened. After he becomes a mouse, he manages to escape their clutches. The witches find him and unable to escape, he is turned into a mouse. Then one of the witches smells the boy behind the screen (children smell like dog’s droppings to witches). The witches demonstrate the Delayed Action Mouse-Maker on a boy named Bruno and he turns into a mouse. While there, he overhears the witches’ wicked plan to turn children into mice by putting Delayed Action Mouse-Maker in chocolate bars in candy shops all around England. He hides behind a screen in the room and hopes the witches, who have an amazing sense of smell, will not find him. While there, the boy finds himself locked alone in a room with two hundred witches.
The boy’s grandmother gets sick and the two are forced to go to a hotel on the coast of England in order to improve her health. The grandmother tells her grandson that all the stories are true and that he must be on the lookout for witches, who loathe children. She tells him stories about witches, who have claws instead of finger nails, bald heads, large nose holes, square feet, and blue spit.
In this book, a boy’s parents die in a car crash, so he goes to live in Norway with his grandmother. The Witches is a popular children’s book written by Roald Dahl.
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