Magic beans transforms an ordinary peach into a gigantic piece of fruit and its surrounding insect populace human-sized, before going on to rescue James Henry Trotter from his sad life with his evil aunts, Spiker and Sponge.
I remember not really liking James and the Giant Peach all that much when I was a kid but I still thought it was an ok book. On re-reading though, eh, no - it’s not very good at all!
I remember not really liking James and the Giant Peach all that much when I was a kid but I still thought it was an ok book. On re-reading though, eh, no - it’s not very good at all!
There’s no real story - the peach heads to America for no reason - and plot elements were too contrived, even for a kid’s book. James lassoing hundreds of seagulls in no time at all and then them carrying them across the sea - it’s just too easy and unimaginative.
A lot of the characters were unmemorable - besides the Centipede and the Earthworm nobody really has a personality and those two weren’t exactly very likeable either! Oh and I haaaated the tedious songs that kept cropping up - it was like reading bloody Tolkien again!
I liked the more macabre elements of the story like the oddly sinister Cloud-Men and the “immense grey batlike creature swooping down towards them out of the dark” - Quentin Blake’s drawing really sells them too. The batlike creature is a really weird inclusion as it has no bearing on the plot and is never mentioned again. But that kind of strange detail is partly why you re-read as you notice stuff you didn’t the first time!
Unfortunately besides these brief moments, it was a very boring read. James and the Giant Peach may have been Roald Dahl’s breakthrough book but it’s definitely not among his best.
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