JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH - (Book Review by Caitlin Smith)

James And The Giant Peach by Roald Dahl is an easy book to read. It has characters from over sized bugs, a peach which is the size of beyond imagination, a boy and of course villains.
This book has the elements of friendship, on how to work and support each other, to go through trying times and of course it has a happy ending.
This book is about a boy, an enormous peach inhabited by giant insects that plunges from the sky and becomes impaled on the Empire State Building.
The main character is James Henry Trotter made an orphan at the age of four when his parents are killed in an unbelievable accident while shopping in London. James goes to live with his aunts-Aunt Sponge,an overweight,short, lazy lady and Aunt Spike a bony , tall,  nasty woman who always has bad intentions. James is verbally and physically abused by his aunts. He is made to work long hours every day chopping wood and cleaning. His room is the basement and there is no bed so he has to sleep on the cold floor. James hardly gets a decent meal, he is not allowed to go to school or have any friends and is not allowed to go out of the yard.

So how does the peach come into the story? One day while James was chopping wood, an old peculiar looking man appears and gives James some magic green crystals.Who is this old man?-a wizard perhaps and the magic crystals are meant to solve James problems, but James the unlucky boy trips,falls flat on his face and spills the the beans into the root of the peach tree that never had a blossom and some were eaten by insects,worms and arachnids and that is how they became over sized,and a peach appeared on the tree and it grows to the size of a house.

Meet  Old  Green Grasshopper,Spider, Lady-bird with nine black spots, Centipede with 42 legs not 100, Earthworm ,Silk-worm and Glow-worm which are not worms but lady fireflies without wings. James and the over sized bugs together roll away in the giant peach,flattening the aunts as they leave and away they go floating on the Atlantic. Here is were the adventure begins,the peach is attacked by sharks, the peach flies (carried by seagulls),  and there is the cloud men,tall wispy angry creatures who control the weather and who attack James and the peach with hailstones, brushes, paints , hammers, frying pans,anything they could get their hands on. In the end the peach lands on the Empire State Building but trouble still follows because the Mayor,the police and the fire department think the biggest bomb in the history of the world was hovering over New York City or was it a flying saucer from outer space or men from Mars.

It is a happy ending for everyone.My favorite character from this book is centipede because of his sense of humor and because after centipede bites through the stem of the peach the adventure begins and when it rolls down the hill it crushes the nasty aunts.

I recommend this book fro ages 5 and above.