A
Title: James and the Giant Peach
Author: Roald Dahl
Publication Info: Puffin April 26, 2000
ISBN: 0140374248
Genre: Top 100 Banned Books
“Then, one day, James’ mother and father went to London to do some shopping, and there a terrible thing happened. Both of them suddenly got eaten up (in full daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street) by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the London Zoo.”
Like any good parent, Mr. Trelease anxiously looked to his young son, expecting he’d need to offer reassurance. “No, mommy and daddy aren’t going to die. No, animals cannot escape from the zoo. And even if they did, rhinoceroses are herbivores.” But his son was not even fazed. In fact, his only question was, “Is there a picture?”
In the tradition of most great children’s literature, James and the Giant Peach features an orphaned protagonist (James) who must thwart oppressive adults (the evil Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker) to escape a dreary life and find adventure with true friends (in this case, an assortment of overgrown insects). It’s the exciting, humorous story of a seven-year-old boy who crosses the Atlantic Ocean in an enormous fruit and lives to tell the tale. As a child, I must have read it a dozen times, and to my recollection, it isn’t the least bit titillating. (Well, okay, it contains the word “ass.”) Yet this book is #56 on the Banned Books list. Why?
Well, probably partly because it contains the word “ass.” Others have accused the book of “promoting” drugs and alcohol, because the Centipede sings a song that mentions monkeys chewing tobacco, hens taking snuff and porcupines drinking wine. But I’m guessing mostly this book gets challenged for reasons like those of a Stafford County, Virginia, school district, which (according to DeleteCensorship.org) placed Dahl’s book on restricted access in the library because it “encourages children to disobey their parents and other adults.”
Yes, there you have it. Like many of the children’s books on the 100 Most Banned list, James and the Giant Peach contains the most enduring and subversive message in children’s literature: kids can make it on their own. I don’t know about you, but as a kid, I loved to read books in which children outwitted evil and/or clueless adults. I’d go so far as to say I lived to read those books. And Jim Trelease’s son was certainly eager to read them, too. Because kids crave this message. They need to hear it, whether the people in Stafford County, Virginia, like it or not – that people, even very young people, possess the wit and courage to triumph over injustice, oppression, and peach-eating sharks.
When you were a child, which books empowered you to believe you just might be able to make it, even if your parents fell victim to an enormous angry rhinoceros? Along with James and the Giant Peach, some of my favorites were The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg (no, the protagonists of these books are not orphaned, but they are on their own in Victorian England and New York City, respectively – close enough).
I loved The Mixed Up Files- in fact I just bought myself a new copy a few months ago. I read all of Dahls, but another favortite was The Phantom Tollbooth with Milo and the “Watchdog.”
Good thing we are banning these books- God forbid children are raised with the idea of independence and competence. Much better if they feel weak and in need of others to protect them. If we’re not careful they’ll want to make their own decisions. This is how anarachy starts.
http://www.amazon.com/Hideaway-Summer-Beverly-Hollett-Renner/dp/0060248637
The Hideaway (as the paperback was called) remains one of my favorite books – although now, as a parent, the thought of my two children living in a shack in the woods and raising baby raccoons curls my hair. Still, I intend to read it to my sons because, should they ever living in a shack in the woods for the summer, raise baby raccons, and outwit a couple of hunters, I’d want them to do it like Addie and Clay.
Ooh! I loved this book, Mixed up Files (that was one of my all time kiddie favorites), and even MORE subversive in the Dahl department, Matilda!
Yet, I love both my parents and still wouldn’t smart off to my mom too horribly much, because I though I’m 26, she’d still swat me across the chops for it.
So anyone read these “kids make it alone” books that actually did go on to be a disobedient, earthworm-accompanied heroin addict? Anyone? Bueller?
Oh yes, I loved James and the Giant Peach, The Mixed-up Files…, and The Phantom Tollbooth. God forbid we show children that they can have full, independent lives without permission from their parents!
I often listen to my James and Giant Peach audiobook. I love Dahl and wish I’d discovered him as a kid.
I’m a great proponent of teaching my daughter not to blindly following everything anyone tells her. I think kids who are taught to do that are the ones who end up smoking, drinking etc because they submit too easily to peer pressure.
I can’t wait until she gets into chapter books so we can read James and the Giant Peach. And even further down the line, Judy Blume and the like. (I am so tired of Dora books). My word is time47, I guess I should slow down. 🙂
Er…sorry to point this out, but Willoughby Chase is set quite a bit earlier than you’re thinking – in the reign of James III, rather than Madame “We Are NOT Amused!” Victoria Regina herself. There’s a reference to it in the sequel Black Hearts in Battersea, which is all about Simon instead of Bonnie and Sylvia.
That’s also a fun book, by the way, as is the one that comes after it – Night Birds on Nantucket. Yes, I own them all, why do you ask?
I still love subversive children’s books with all my heart (Roald Dahl, you are my hero), but it sticks out a little.
I remember I loved “The Boxcar Children” series for that very same reason. It was thrilling, as a kid, to read about other kids who were able to make it on their own. I read James and TBC series, and anything like that I could get my hands on.
And yet, I never ran away from home to try to find an abandoned train to live in…though I did keep my suitcase packed and under my bed just in case ;).
Anna J. Evans
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
I have always wanted to hide out in a museum. So cool.
Yeah, I was raised with Willy Wonka and Milo and The Grinch. I love subversive literature.
All the ones people have mentioned, plus the Great Brain books, definitely. And the vast majority of children’s fantasy relies on the idea that kids know about the magic and their parents don’t/won’t believe them.
In some cases I loved that, but I remember actually being annoyed by it in a lot of cases, convinced that if *I* were in danger from evil fairies or saw dead people or something, *my* mom would believe me about it.
Oops! Sorry, Fizz.
This is my review… It’s been a great while since I read Willoughby, and I’d not remembered (or perhaps not realized at the tender age I read it) that it was set in an alternate 18th century. I just assumed Victorian because I remember the trains so vividly. But then, I perhaps should have known better because, to my knowledge, there were no wolves left in Victorian England. I did not think to check it. *smacks wrist* Bad librarian!
Anyway, it’s a wonderful book.
And thanks everyone, for commenting and reminding me of more great books to re-read and share with my own kids when they’re old enough. (Asrai, we are stuck on Dora now, too.)
I loved the Boxcar Children books too. I always fantasized about having to be heroic and make it on my own. Of course, I would then wake up from said daydream and go ask my mommy to make me some lunch. void(0);
wink
Never, EVER fuck with Roald Dahl.
I recently saw his biography on a satellite tv station. He didn’t start writing until he was in his mid-thirties and had served as a pilot in WWII—and, therefore, was good ‘n’ wickedly seasoned from the jump. (How refreshing not to hear any of that “I’ve been writing since I was a prenatal cluster of cells” boojah you read in 95% of all author bio’s.)
Now I’m convinced that sweetly perverse s.o.b. can find some way of bitch-slapping his detractors, even from the grave.
No no no, never fuck with Roald Dahl.
James III? Um. There have only been two. An alternate world indeed, because trains were pretty thin on the ground before the 19th century.
Ages since I read that. I loved everything by roald Dahl and he’s still one of my heroes. Matilda
, especially. I fantasised about making that chalk dance too!
Dahl has a couple of autobiograpies—Boy and Going Solo—which I remember my dad reading to me when I was tiny. His real life was just as hair-raising as his books. I vividly remember hearing how the young Dahl’s nose was sliced off when he flew through the windshield of his mother’s car. That, and eating shrimp brains in Norway.
I cried when he died.
It seems to me…in all these books that are accused of being “subversive” and promoting children disobeying their parents…well, the parents or other authority figures in these books are NEVER kind, intelligent and having the best interests of the child at heart. Am I wrong? I mean…if my daughter were somehow shipped away to live with some clueless, mean-spirited or dreadful adult, I hope she’d learn to fend for herself!
My friend wouldn’t let me give her daughter The Secret Garden because the little girl heroine was orphaned. She thought it would somehow traumatize her daughter to read about a little girl whose parents die.
Not entirely the same thing, but I always liked Swallows and Amazons because it showed kids having amazing adventures outside doing dangerous(ish) things with no adult supervision, which is, as we all know, the very best part of childhood, and therefore the one that is disappearing the fastest.
My 6th Grade teacher read aloud to us from James and the Giant Peach (and later, The Secret Garden and Island of the Blue Dolphins) every day after lunch. No matter what we all – the kids who acted up, the kids who couldn’t sit still during math :ahem: – managed to settle in for a chapter or two. We were all past the point where anybody thought to read aloud to us, and this (which we all thought we were too cool for at the beginning of the year) wound up being a real treat.
But, of course, we were only using it as some sort of schematic for overthrowing our parents, and eventually, the government.
I can still vividly remember going into my local library, walking to the Roald Dahl shelf, which was in the adult section and not the children’s, and getting James and the Giant Peach off the shelf. He will always be a favorite for me, because his books were among the first that showed me how wonderful reading could be. I will always be grateful to him for that.
On a side note, the love and devotion he showed to his wife, Patricia Neal, when she had a stroke was something that a man of honor would do. Got to love a guy who stands by his woman, especially like that.
I loved Roald Dahl—I don’t even remember when I first ran across James and the Giant Peach but the fact that I still love it despite the presence of a giant spider (I’m severely arachnophobic) speaks highly of the book, I’d say. 😉
I also remember several books from when I was 8-10 years old. The Egypt Game and The Headless Cupid, both by Zilpha Keatley Snyder (I’m still looking for a copy of the latter); The Dark Green Tunnel by Allan Eckert; Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn (still scares me years later); C.S. Lewis; and a novel about the French Resistance called Twenty and Ten whose author I don’t recall.
All of them were about children who had to deal with all kinds of things without parents, sometimes supernatural and sometimes not. I plan to acquire copies of all of them for my children.
Yeah, and I wonder if A Series Of Unfortunate Events has been banned? After all, pretty much every adult in those books is either useless or very evil, so the kids have to fend for themselves.
Most of my kid’s books were about animals who could talk, and apart from the fact that I have more conversations with my cat than with other people, I don’t think it’s warped me very…hello? No, I don’t want another straightjacket. Thank you.
Just thought I’d mention that The Phantom Tollbooth is actually Norton Juster not Dahl…both are awesome though, so it’s easy to see the confusion!
Beloved Benjamin is Waiting by Jean Karl is one of my all time favorite “kid on her own stories”. Hiding out in a cemetary and romance with an alien…what’s not to love?
Also, Julie Andrews, yes, THAT Julie Andrews wrote a book, Mandy, that has a girl living briefly on her own.
I remember when ET came out that George Will, then Newsweek’s conservative columnist wrote how little Victoria Will would never see that movie because it made adults appear frightening—the men in Hazmat suits with jingling tools on their belts and a great deal of it was shot at child (and ET) level. Amazing how anyone would want not to teach their children that there are some adults that don’t have their best interests in heart and who you shouldn’t trust.
I wonder whatever happened to little Victoria Will?