Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

I began this year with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because I started reading with this book. Sure I’d been able to read for four or five years by the time I picked it up. I’d been dabbling in E.B. White and Laura Ingalls Wilder, Beverly Clearly and Judy Blume, probably a bit of L. Frank Baum, too. I don’t remember reading those books, though. That is, the actual experience of reading them for the first time. I remember, or so I think, what it was like to break into Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, much like breaking into a basketball-sized Cadbury Crème Egg.

I still love Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What’s not to love, really? It’s whimsical and funny, creative and exciting. It’s loaded with improbabilities, just rewards, and comeuppances. It’s loaded with adventures designed perfectly for imaginative child readers and for those of us who refuse to grow up. And it’s loaded with candy.

I still like the same things I loved about this book as a kid: the genuinely good, loveable and decent Charlie Bucket; the genius but still child-like Willy Wonka; the funny Oompa-Loompa songs; the very way the tale unfolds. Of course my overly-educated adult mind finds a large number of impossibilities in the story and its details now, but I’m also better aware than I was as a youngster of just why I liked this book so much. Not only is it silly and fantastical (and loaded with candy), but it’s pace and structure are just right. A dual tension builds in the first third of the book amid the Golden Ticket excitement and the Bucket family’s extreme poverty. We race through Wonka’s factory but stop often enough and long enough to behold wonders (and bad puns), and to subject each of the visiting children to an extreme test of character. And of course there’s a happy ending. As a child I was (and am still) a sucker for a happy ending.

I’ve started giving copies of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my nieces who can read. I’m hoping they’ll enjoy it even half as much as I do. Really, I want everyone to read this book. This story is wonderfully adventurous and deliciously detailed (and loaded with candy), a perfectly fertile field on which to exercise the mind’s eye. It will be impossible, no matter how many times I read it, to stop loving this book.

 

 

A Year of Books I’ve Read Before