However, the grandmother warns the boy to be on his guard, since English witches are known to be among the most vicious in the world, notorious for turning children into loathsome creatures so that unsuspecting adults will kill them.
Plot diagram the witches roald dahl how to#
She tells him how to recognise them, and that she is a retired witch hunter (she, herself, had an encounter with a witch when she was a child, which left her with a missing thumb).Īccording to the boy's grandmother, a real witch looks exactly like an ordinary woman, but there are ways of telling whether she is a witch: real witches have claws instead of fingernails, which they hide by wearing gloves are bald, which they hide by wearing wigs that often make them break out in rashes have square feet with no toes, which they hide by wearing uncomfortable pointy shoes have eyes with pupils that change colours have blue spit which they use for ink, and have large nostrils which they use to sniff out children to a witch, a child smells of fresh dogs droppings the dirtier the child, the less likely she is to smell them.Īs specified in the parents' will, the narrator and his grandmother return to England, where he was born and had attended school, and where the house he is inheriting is located. The boy loves all his grandmother's stories, but he is especially enthralled by the stories about real-life witches who she says are horrific female demons who seek to kill human children. The story is narrated from the perspective of an unnamed seven-year-old English boy, who goes to live with his Norwegian grandmother after his parents are killed in a tragic car accident. The book was adapted into an unabridged audio reading by Lynn Redgrave, a stage play and a two-part radio dramatization for the BBC, a 1990 film directed by Nicolas Roeg which starred Anjelica Huston and Rowan Atkinson, a 2008 opera by Marcus Paus and Ole Paus, and a 2020 film directed by Robert Zemeckis.
The most common critique against the novel was based on perceived misogyny. It is one of the top all-time children's novels, but received originally mixed reviews. The Witches was originally published in 1983 by Jonathan Cape in London, with illustrations by Quentin Blake who had previously collaborated with Dahl. The witches are ruled by the extremely vicious and powerful Grand High Witch, who arrives in England to organize her plan to turn all of the children in England into mice. The story is set partly in Norway and partly in England, and features the experiences of a young English boy and his Norwegian grandmother in a world where child-hating societies of witches secretly exist in every country. The Witches is a British children's dark fantasy novel by the British writer Roald Dahl.
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