Matilda Audio

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Summary: Matilda By Roald Dahl
Review: As being a vivacious reader, and critic. I'd have to vote Matilda, on my top 10 list. I think that Matilda is fabulous. It sends out a good moral for children: telling them that they can do anything if they put their mind to it. It teaches children not only to appreciate what they have, but also the values and feelings that burn inside a child, ready to give way. Matilda is a very bright child, who has no limits to what she can do. Matilda, in a few words, is about a young girl. She is not loved at home by her family. She turns to where else? The library, to take herself into a story. Matilda then is offered by her reluctant parents, to attend school. (Which Matilda loves) She is way beyond the normal child, academically. She befriends her lovely teacher, Miss. Honey. And then of course, there is the Trunchbull. The meanest, scariest head mistress ever to face this earth. So with Roald Dahl's, "Matilda," begins adventure, and sensitivity into the child (Adult) reader.

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Summary: Love it
Review: This is a great book. If you read it you would see why it was made into a movie. It is funny and sad. It is a very good book(one that I recommend) for kids under 12. Don't just see the movie, read the book

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Summary: A normal book for children
Review: This book Matilda is about a five and a half year old girl who is a genius. Matilda goes to a school where an evil headmistress is. She doesn't likes children and she treats them very hard. Only the class teacher Miss Honey of Matilda is nice and kindly to their children. The parents of Matilda doesn't interests in Matilda and in her especially talents. Often Matilda punish her parents a little bit, because they aren't nice to her. I have one sister and one brother and when they get on my nerves, I play sometimes practical tricks on them. This book is very detailed and I like the characters of the person, because they describe the persons very good. I can imagine how the persons look like.

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Summary: Trunchbull: Do villainous names get any better?
Review: Originally published in 1988, "Matilda" was one of the last books author Roald Dahl wrote before his death in 1990. Most authors as they age become more cynical and dour. Think of the final writings of Dickens or Twain and how bitter they seemed in their late years. Then look at "Matilda". Here we have a sweet charming little piece of literature about a girl that is both good and interesting. Creating characters that you identify intrinsically with is not only difficult but (in children's books) sometimes near impossible. Reading "Matilda", it becomes clear that Roald Dahl never lost his touch for creating wonderful original characters and situations.

The heroine of this little book also carries its name. Matilda is incredibly intelligent, even as a small child. Living with her boorish parents and oblivious brother, she teaches herself to read from the various magazine and newspapers lying about the house. Her parents are completely indifferent to their only daughter and it is only by playing small tricks on them when they've been particularly nasty that little Matilda is able to keep a hold on her sanity. By age five and a half Matilda has read all the children's books in the library and quite a few of the adult ones as well. On entering school for the first time, our protagonist comes face to face with a very worthy enemy. The Head Teacher, Miss Trunchbull, is the worst kind of dangerous violent adult. It is only through Matilda's cleverness that she is able to come to the aid of her teacher, Miss Honey, and save the school from the Trunchbull's insanity.

As I mentioned before, Matilda is just the nicest kid ever. Intelligent without ever becoming pig-headed. Nice without becomes precious. She's just a swell child all around. Through her, Dahl takes some mighty fine cracks as his fellow kiddie lit authors. I was especially fond of the portion in which Matilda points out that though C.S. Lewis and Tolkien are fine writers, "There aren't many funny bits". And as we all know, Dahl is the master of the funny bit for kids. This book is chock full of them too. It contains all the usual peculiar Dahl touches (like kids being swung out of the playground by their pigtails) as well as practical jokes and nasty adults. The Trunchbull is perhaps THE nastiest adult ever to grace the pages of the Dahl world. Definitely unhinged, she abuses the children around her, coming just shy of actual physical contact. It is amazing then that Dahl doesn't dispatch of her in a violent or crazy fashion. She merely...disappears. Likewise Matilda's parents get their comeuppance by merely fleeing the country to Spain. Dahl was quite soft in his old age, it seems.

Reading this book today I was struck by how much Lemony Snicket owes to Mr. Dahl. Not just the usual adults-are-nasty-cruel-and-possibly-batty take, but the narrative voice as well. It took me a couple minutes to realize that this was Dahl talking and not Mr. Handler. Illustrated by Quentin Blake, the book is perfectly complimented by the illustrators' insane imaginings and concoctions. The Blake/Dahl pairing is often inspired, and it works to its best advantage here. I can't imagine this book without Blake's particular little pointy nosed heroine gracing the pages. For those parents who either don't approve of Dahl or just don't "get" him, I think "Matilda" is the perfect story to win them over. You'd have to be pretty hard of heart not to love its little heroine and the troubles she gets into. A charming treat to be enjoyed for years to come.

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Summary: Cleverness
Review: Matilda is a lovely and brilliant little girl, who is ill-treated and neglected by her disgusting parents
She go's to the library, to take books out, everyday, by four, and slowly discovers brainpower within herself (as the narrator reminds us, we only use less than a tenth of our brainpower-well not Matilda!).

Finally her father agrees to send her to school, a school which is run by the hideous and cruel psychopath Miss Trunchbull, who resembles something of Stalinist labour camp commissar.
Well, she certainly abuses the children, from swinging a tiny girl by her pigtails, to locking children up in a tiny dark chamber with spikes in the door.
By the way, this can all be very frightening to children of pre-school age.
But Matilda is shown love and care by her wonderful and sweet young teacher, Miss Honey The most wonderful part of the film however is seeing Matilda see that the horrific Miss Trunchbull gets her comeuppance, and finding the happiness and love she deserves.
Beautifully written with deep sensitivity and great wit.
One of Dahl's best works for children

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Summary: Waltzing with Matilda
Review: In the world of children's writing, reading and imagination, Roald Dahl endures. His books capture two quintessential qualities we love in children: their sense of humour and their absolute (if not wonderfully brutal) honesty. MATILDA, named after the eponymous heroine of the story, simply sparkles with wit and intelligence on the one hand, whilst resonating with emotional depth on the other. This story of a child prodigy, mostly unrecognized and unappreciated by her family and peers, is witty, humorous and engaging, whilst the illustrations are as fun as the story itself. Quentin Blake draws with his usual flourish and confidence, and each picture is vibrant and full of flesh and vitality, almost leaping off the page. Matilda's fierce intelligence, her extraordinary humility and sensitivity, and her inspiring courageousness, endears her to us even before we have journeyed with her past her third birthday. Her precociousness is handled very differently by different characters. To her family, Matilda's native intelligence is almost a disability and certainly a threat. To her peers at school and to Miss Honey, her teacher, Matilda is an ally and a friend. To Miss Trunchbull, the principal, Matilda is simply another brat she must endure in her job.

The magic of Dahl's storytelling is that, like Blake, he paints in very broad pen strokes a little girl whose brain (and heart) appears to be too big for her body. There is profound joy and wisdom contained in Matilda's deceptively simple world of books, bullies and blackboards, yet what makes Matilda lovable is not so much her gift of genius as her author's steadfast understanding that she is, after all, only a normal five-year-old girl: prone to acts of vengeance and fits of punitive thinking one day, and acts of kindness and moments of breathtaking wisdom the next. Matilda plots, shouts, dances, rebels and chatters away like any other little girl - who also happens to be a formidable and voracious reader of literature, and who also happens to have telekinetic powers. Dahl's sense of humour and lighthearted approach to Matilda's difficult home life also gives rise to the delightful caricatures that are Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood. Matilda's parents are pure tragedy - vainglorious, foolish and vicious. The miracle that is Matilda also helps us to understand, and sympathize with, her alienation from her father and mother whose lives are punctuated by sawdust, hair tonic, TV dinners and soap operas. Matilda's inner resources and depth of soul constantly chafe against her parents' brutality and impenetrable insipidness - a rubbing that ultimately results in the story's happy and peaceful ending.

MATILDA's other great caricature is the appropriately-named Agatha Trunchbull. True to her moniker, Miss Trunchbull disrupts a class very like a bull in a china shop: she snorts, sees red and charges headlong at a terrified child or teacher. Much damage ensues and perhaps bones would break like so many pieces of porcelain, only the children in this school seem to have the remarkable ability to bounce upright when hurled from a great distance by the crazed principal. Like any dictator with thoughts of world domination, Miss Trunchbull rules her school with an iron fist, each finger as big as a rolling pin. Hungry for power, built like a tank, dressed like a hunter in the African safari, Miss Trunchbull also reveals that a person is a bully not because she confident, but because she is fearful and cowardly at heart. Matilda will also tell you that size and courage are sometimes necessarily out of proportion, and that varying degrees of imagination can be found even in the most unimaginative of bulls. Miss Trunchbull, together with Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood, tickle our funny bones because they are so inescapably human in their pettiness, bawdiness and brutality. The comic aspect of their deranged personalities is balanced by the integrity of Matilda and Miss Honey, who serve as their foils.

MATILDA is a wonderful and enjoyable romp through a little girl's world and her points of view. From where she stands, looking up at us like a mushroom, the world can be a very big place. Yet inside her mind, where she travels the universe with her hot and wide-open eyes, it is we who become the mushrooms - and this is what gives us a grasp of Roald Dahl's magic.