James and the Giant Peach

I'd listened to Roald Dahl books as a child, my dad always read to me. Now I'm reading them to my kids and the stories are still gripping, funny and so descriptive. They always ask me to keep reading at the end of a chapter, always eager to find out what happens next. It's a lovely time to spend with them and stirring their imagination. If you have kids, Roald Dahl books should be top of the list

Open this edition and you will find the text is peach colored! That makes it hard to read not only for parens, but also for children who might want to read it too, or might be inspired to do so one day after hearing it read to them ... which, after all, is the point of the exercise. But why should this agitate me so? For two reasons. First, the primary and unbreakable rule of typography in book design is that it should be legible! We should never struggle to decode what is printed on the page. Here, the pale, peach-tinted ink -- set off against the off-white, cheaply pulped page -- fails the text miserably. Second, the magnificent illustrations of Sir Quentin Blake suffer too from the reduced gradations of tone that resent from the tinted inking. And, to add insult to injury, this edition is called "deluxe."

James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl and illustrated by Quentin Blake is a great book if you want to be entertained, or are starting to read chapter books. This book, published in 1961, is one of the most famous books worldwide to this day. It is a fictional-fantasy story and has a child-friendly plot. I would say the book is good for anyone from 8 to 14 years old. James and the Giant Peach is a very descriptive book and makes it easy to imagine the scenes. This story starts off in London, England, in the countryside in James’s aunt’s house. Later on, James meets bugs inside the peach. The peach then ends up in the Atlantic Ocean and arrives in America. James is the protagonist. His friends are giant bugs named Old-Green-Grasshopper, Centipede, Earthworm, Spider, and Ladybug. Although these bugs can be impatient, they cooperate with James and are friendly to him. James is a curious orphan who was trapped with his cruel aunts for many years. One day, his aunts went to their garden and found an enormous peach on one of the trees. The aunts locked him outside of the house for some time as punishment, and that's when he spotted the giant peach. He examined the peach and found a big hole. Big enough for James to fit in it. He stepped into the hole and found the seed of the peach. The seed of the peach opened. James went inside where he met his future friends. Unfortunately, not after long, the peach started rolling, and rolling, and rolling. And that’s how his adventure begins. James and the Giant Peach is filled with descriptive scenes and vivid words like “hurtled” or “plunged” which makes the book fun to read. It is very easy to imagine and feels like you're in the story itself. This novel is similar to other Roald Dahl books such as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Both books are easy to picture and have fun words in them such as “scrumptious”, “delectable”, or “enraptured”. The common theme can be that karma comes around. Even though James was treated poorly by his aunts, he doesn’t become bitter or mean spirited. He still helped out the bugs. This shows that you can help out people and make friends even when it seems like you can’t. The theme of James and the Giant Peach relates to my life when I switched schools in fifth grade. I thought I wouldn’t be able to make friends or have fun. Soon someone did end up making friends with me, and then I had hope about making more friends. In just a little bit of time, I was having a lot of fun during recess and had many friends.

Absolutely appalled by the story line: kids’ parents die, kid is abused and bullied by his aunts. How can this book be possibly recommended for children?! I read a few pages and had to put it away as I could no longer go on. It goes straight to trash tomorrow.

This book was fine (I love the story and I was reading it to my daughter) until I got to page 26... where it skips to page 59. Somehow pages 27-58 are not included (anywhere else in the book). Of course I had this experience adter the “amazon return window closed” so I’m out of luck. I didn’t think to makes sure all the pages were included in a new book! Buyer beware!