The Witches

I am currently finishing up The Witches by Roald Dahl.

I was recently told by a teacher that the "children's stories" I write are very, very creative - but also very disturbing and that the day I become a published children's author is the day he wonders what went wrong with the world. Thanks!

However, The Witches is a disturbing story of which is based around pure creativity that a child seeks and enjoys. Children don't always like books with upstanding morals about puppies getting caught in sewage drains and being saved by a hunky, well-mannered firefighters. Children want stories that are crazy, out of this world, and something that will make them giggle and be engrossed in the world of words at the same time. A good children's book is one that can be read aloud by an enthusiastic parent who can do voices for characters to get the child to believe that such a crazy world is real. The perfect bedtime story. Such stories get children to later in life read by themselves.

The Witches is a story that I would highly recommend based on the above statements about children's books. The story is about a young child and his grandmother - who informs the boy that witches exist everywhere throughout the world in large numbers. These witches look like real people on the outside - however, they always wear gloves due to clawed hands, scratch their heads due to being bald and having to wear a wig, fitting their wide toe-less feet, have blue saliva, and many other hidden, horrible things. These witches abhor children and seek to demolish them at all costs. To witches, children smell like "dog's drrrroooopppppppingggggs."

The boy is terrified at what he hears about witches and fears for his own life, as a child, since these seemingly ladylike women seek to murder him. One can see why this book was under scrutiny by censors! The story revolves around the boy and his grandmother arriving at a hotel in England. The boy enters a large room in the hotel said to be hosting the "Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children." However, as the ladies start entering the room...it turns out that the two hundred women who have just entered the room are actually all witches! And that he is at the very secret annual meeting of every witch in England - of which his grandmother has been trying to discover the location of her whole life as a sort of "witchhunter."

The Grand High Witch is concocting a plan to destroy all of the children in one fell swoop!!

Who will stop them?