After Rubbing Eyeballs with Charlie and His Family

by Roger B Rueda

Have a great summer, everyone! Here is the story of the children’s book I’ve read after a student of mine requested me to go over the book by Roald Dahl.

The story opens with the telling of Poor Charlie Bucket's depressing life of paucity and that he is virtually starving to demise, but his fate changes for the better when he wins a lifetime supply of candy—and a chance to visit Willy Wonka's extraordinary, hush-hush chocolate factory. This charming, cheeky tale, one of Roald Dahl's best, has captivated me—and I’m sure those children who have read the book, too.

There are five fortunate people who find a Golden Ticket wrapped in one of Willy Wonka's wonderful candy bars who win a visit to his mystifying chocolate factory. Charlie Bucket is too poor to buy more than one candy bar a year, so when he wins a ticket, his whole family celebrates.

The four other fluky children are not as nice as Charlie, and they're punished for their bad manners. Greedy Augustus Gloop falls into the chocolate river he's trying to drink from and gets sucked up a pipe. Chewing-gum addict Violet Beauregarde grabs a stick of gum that blows her up into an oversize blueberry. Spoiled Veruca Salt is deemed a “bad nut” by Wonka's trained squirrels and thrown in the trash. And Mike Teavee demands to be “sent by television” and gets shrunk in the course. But there's a superb surprise waiting for Charlie at the end of the visit.

Infrequently, if ever, has a morality relation been dressed up in such an enjoyable story. Dahl unmistakably has a point to make here, but never does the reader feel he is preaching; he's just reveling in giving spoiled kids their most entirely just deserts.

Well-known for his vicious characters, Dahl has peopled these pages with some exceedingly unforgettable bad kids (brats). Readers the world over love to chuckle with delight at their crazy behavior—and its consequences.

In the best fairy-tale tradition, Dahl doesn't conceal the fact that the world can be a grim and unfair place. Charlie's disheartening life of poverty at the beginning of the novel reflects this bleak view. But, also in the best fairy-tale tradition, Dahl appeals to the strong sense of natural justice in children, and invites them to raise the roof in a marvelously imagined world where people, both good and bad, get precisely what they ought to have.

In this case, the imagined world is the chocolate factory, where waiflike factory workers, known as Oompa-Loompas, row Charlie, Grandpa Joe, and the others down a chocolate river in a yacht made out of a gigantic pink boiled sweet. It's a marvelous world where they make “eatable marshmallow pillows,” “hot ice cream for cold days,” “fizzy lifting drinks” that make you float, and “rainbow drops” that let you “spit in six different colors.” And, in the end, it's just the place for Charlie.

Here are four special reasons that I like this book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Well, the first reason because the author makes everything so suspenseful that I can't put the book down like the way I play Quadra Pop on my cell phone. Like when Charlie won the golden ticket, I was so into the book that I kept reading about what he did in the factory for another hour. The description in the book was so good. He would explain everything so detailed nothing was not told about the character's personality. He even told that Charlie had a scratch on his head. The top of the book says that Dahl is the most scrumdiddlieumpscious story writer in the world. The setting was very fitting for the way the story went on. Charlie's family lived on the outskirts of town right near Willie Wonka's chocolate factory, and they could smell the chocolate all the way from their run down shack. The characters where so into the story that you felt like it was you that they were describing instead of the characters. When Dahl was explaining how Willie Wonka was so still then seemed to trip but he did a somersault instead of falling. The last thing was how he ended the story by giving Charlie the chocolate factory instead of ruining Wonka's wonderful factory.

This summer, perhaps you can take pleasure in the paperback if you want. It is so exhilarating and gripping. For one sometimes we just waste our time hanging out at java shops. Salt away most of your time reading good reads.

Have your shout and murmur at inkslinger215@live.com or 09068541933.