Switch Bitch

Rating:
Summary: Brisk and bold
Review: An easy read, well-plotted, and often surprising, these four stories should please most readers with a taste for the ironic. The philandering, eccentric character of "Uncle Oswald" is a hedonistic delight, and the two stories involving him are certainly the better half of this small collection. It takes a masterful writer to make such an amoral protagonist work, in any context. The other two tales, involving a wife-swapping and a widow ready to try intimacy again, are less gripping, and a bit anticlimactic with their payoffs.

Rating:
Summary: Not what I had hoped.
Review: I checked this out on tape from the library for a long car trip, and I was excited to experience some "adult" work from the author of my beloved _Matilda_ and _The Witches_.

I was pretty gripped by the first story; I found the character to be very layered and interesting. Dahl included a lot of elements that lent depth to the character. But the ending disappointed me; it was so gimmicky! I felt rather cheated, as though the whole story had been a long road to a cheap punch line. What about all that character detail? Had it been for nothing?

The rest of the stories seemed the same way, too.

I wouldn't call the book "worthless." It was certainly entertaining. But by the third story, all I could do was listen and try to guess what the next punch line would be, and the layers of the characters seemed to lose all meaning.

Rating:
Summary: the most entertaining short story writer
Review: Roald Dahl, perhaps the most entertaining short story writer ever to grace the world with his genius, created a world unto itself in this collection of four short stories, a world in which the characters are eccentrically unforgettable, the plots are sensually graphic, and the endings are climactically uproarious with emotional impact. Dahl is a master of forming stories that ferment over the time it takes the reader to read them and, in his trademark endings, explode with surprise and joy.