Book Review: Boy by Roald Dahl

In You’ve Got Mail, one of my favorite movies, Meg Ryan plays a Manhattan Children’s bookstore owner whose shop is a treasured part of their neighborhood until a chain store moves in around the corner and puts her out of business. Ryan’s character is a sweet, whimsical woman who holds a reading hour for the children in her shop; dressing up in a princess hat and calling herself the Storybook Lady, one Saturday she reads to them a passage from Boy by Roald Dahl:

It was I and I alone who had the idea for the great and daring Mouse Plot. We all have our moments of brilliance and glory, and this was mine. “Why don’t we,” I said, “Slip it into one of Mrs. Pratchett’s jars of sweets? Then when she puts her dirty hand in to grab a handful, she’ll grab a stinky dead mouse instead.” The other four stared at me in wonder. Then, as the sheer genius of the plot began to sink in they all started grinning. They slpped me on the back. They cheered me and danced around the classroom. “We’ll do it today!” they cried. “We’ll do it on the way home! You had the idea,” they said to me, “so you can be the one to put the mouse in the jar.”

Although several people had recommended that I read Roald Dahl’s childhood memoir, I was finally inspired to order myself a copy when I was rewatching You’ve Got Mail just a few weeks ago – and I am so glad that I did! This passage is one of many in Boy that make the reader shiver with the deliciousness of childhood, a subject for which I have a very soft spot. The memoir details Dahl’s idyllic summers spent at home, the horrors of English boarding schools, and several traumatic experiences with doctors in a time before the regular use of anesthetics. Consequently, the reader is constantly experiencing either the elation of adventures in the local candy store, the satisfaction of a perfect day spent swimming in the Norwegian fjords, the terror of several childhood operations, or disbelief at the ways in which British schoolmasters and prefects were allowed to mistreat and abuse the pupils at these fine institutions of learning.

These details aren’t part of any particular plot, but rather a series of musings about childhood – but even so, Dahl had my riveted attention and I finished the 160-novel in a single day. There is something about the descriptions and details of someone’s magical childhood that make me exceedingly happy, and I spent the larger portion of the day with a huge grin on my face (except when my mouth dropped open in shock at the descriptions of the removal of Dahl’s adenoids or the car accident in which his nose is almost “cut clean off!”). I would recommend this novel for most adults, as well as many of the children who are perhaps a bit older and have already read a few of Dahl’s novels. The way in which he tells about them, it seems as though the author had several real-life adventures that are just as entertaining to the reader as his many amusing characters.

Book Review: Mossflower

I was pleasantly surprised to find just how much I enjoyed Redwall, the first of Brian Jacques’s fantasy novels that I had ever read. In comparison, I did not enjoy its prequel Mossflower quite as much, which was disappointing.

Although the second novel that Jacques wrote about his woodland creatures of Mossflower County is certainly full of action and adventure, I could not take seriously the threat posed by the self-involved cat Queen Tsarmina and her incompetent army of rats and stoats. Although he was a rather stereotypical villain, at least Cluny the Scourge was not laughable and his plots were not as easily ruined by bungling troops. There are a few more serious and gruesome battles between different woodland creatures and Tsarmina’s forces, but since most of the fights are brief and the efforts of the rats and stoats are usually fairly absurd and unsuccessful, these battles were not enough to create the feeling that the woodlanders were truly in peril. Tsarmina and her forces seem more like a nuisance than a danger. Of course, some might find the more light-hearted tone of Mossflower enjoyable, but part of what I really enjoyed about Redwall was the combination of the adorable woodland creatures with the truly sinister villains.

Additionally, the characters were not as well-developed in Mossflower as they were in Redwall. I found myself very drawn to the aspiring warrior mouse Matthias in Redwall, who had several quirky little traits and adorable moments before he grew into the confident hero of the novel. In Mossflower, however, Martin the Warrior is not nearly as distinctively developed, and although I wanted to feel an affection for the main character of the novel, I found myself much more fond of Gonff, the self-proclaimed Prince of Mousethieves. Making up little ditties before, during and after each adventure, the joyful and musical little mouse was much more adorable and interesting than his companion Martin.

As for many of the other characters, there were so many mice, otters, squirrels, hedgehogs and ferrets running around in this novel that it started to feel as though Jacques was just enjoying the sheer size of the world he was building and his growing cast of characters – and consequently he did not have time to imagine and describe any of them in any great detail or depth. There are a lot of potentially really interesting characters and plot elements in Mossflower – Boar the Fighter and his mysterious ability to “see what is written,” the otters, Gingervere the cat, “the Mask,” the sea rats – but Jacques tries to cram so many creatures into the novel that we don’t learn enough about any one of them to really get attached to them.

Similar to how Jacques jumps too quickly from one character to the next, he also jumps from one event to the next in Mossflower. Although the quest that Martin and his band undertakes – the journey to Salamandastron – certainly involves many adventures, I didn’t find any of them as involving as the much more well-developed unraveling of the riddle and resulting quest for Martin the Warrior’s sword that Matthias undertakes in Redwall. I was intrigued by the initial riddle that the group had to tackle to determine the route to Salamandastron, but it turned out to be far less complicated and interesting than the search that Matthias had to carry out right within the abbey.

This is not to say that there is nothing enjoyable about Mossflower – I was still somewhat entertained by the novel and I enjoyed Redwall, so I’m not ready to give up on the series yet. I can see why kids would enjoy the many adventures and quick pace of Mossflower. I hope that Mattimeo and Mariel of Redwall will be more well-developed, though.

This post participates in my Focus on Fantasy Reading Challenge... join me in reading fantasy literature this summer!