Monday, 26 December 2022

George's Marvellous Medicine

This book by Roald Dahl is a fucking shitshow, let's be honest. So there's a boy called George who lives a pretty happy life on a farm with his family, all of whom he gets along pretty well with, except his Grandma - who is never actually abusive, she can't really be as she's too disabled to leave her chair - but is sometimes a bit harsh to him. Which drives George, one day, when the rest of his family is out, to bungle together every single random chemical ingredient* he can find in the house, blend it up, and replace his Grandma's medicine with this new concoction. It does not go well. Grandma grows to be like forty feet tall or something. George's dad, when he gets back, isn't concerned for his mother-in-law's wellbeing - he's excited about the prospect of this new medicinal invention for farming methods. George tests the medicine on a chicken and a cow and they both also grow to ridiculous sizes. George's dad gets so excited that he starts trying to throw together a patent whereby he can somehow in the future control a farm of oversized livestock - but George runs out of medicine. And can't remember exactly how he made it in the first place. His dad is upset, but optimistic - and prompts George to try again, which the boy does: only for his new concoction to immediately cause Grandma to shrink so much that she literally cannot be seen by the human eye.

   The end. Dark, right? What, you wanted spoiler warnings? Roald Dahl is basically public domain at this point babe, don't come to a blog specifically about books and complain that a post like this spoiled it for you. Anyway. I would recommend this book as a bedtime story for children between threeish and sevenish, as it's incredibly dark and also funny as fuck.



* I will be frank, the chapter where he's deciding what to put into it is hilarious.

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