To prove this, Blake draws the downward spiral of Mrs. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it.” (7) “If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face.

alone is enough to prove that Dahl’s stories could teach “the moral of the story”, and his advice is perfectly captured in Quentin Blake’s illustrations, making it all the more impactful. This book contained perhaps the most succinct bit of wisdom we’ve yet read in a Dahl book, and I’m glad for it. Unless you’re a Twit, in which case the story’s ending is pretty crummy. The Twits ultimately take a dose of their own medicine (though it’s not enough to cure the Shrinks), and the story ends more happily than some of the other Dahl stories we’ve. Their escalating war of practical jokes reminded us much of Matilda, and certainly kept this one a page-turner throughout. The Twits are a miserably ugly couple with ugly thoughts and ugly behaviors. Twit through up a really clever, nasty trick.” Twit back for the worms in his spaghetti, Mr. Our copy’s cover art by Quentin Blake was enough to draw us in, but this back-cover tagline made the story irresistible: “To pay Mrs. After all, I’d seen some of the movies, so why read the books? Man was I missing out!įor our tenth Dahl book of the year, we went with this crazy little story about Mr. Although I had owned a few them on my shelves growing up, I just had never been tempted to read them. We’re on pace to make it, I think, though the next few promise to be a bit longer.Īs I’ve written elsewhere, I am brand new to Dahl’s books myself. My kids looooved it, and we definitely enjoyed reading through it together, so I do highly recommend, it's just not as good as the first one.As we near December, the kids and I are trying to hurry up our reading to see if we can finish a good dozen of Roald Dahl books this year. However, that's my perspective, as the Mom. There are also a few rather magical details added, and it seems to not fit as much with the rest of the book. This one, however, starts out with a couple of characters who you think will be the main story arc, and they'll learn and grow just as their father before them in the previous book did, but then it ends up being a conglomeration of different storylines, and there's not a clear cut picture of what the theme or moral of the story is. I felt like with the plot in the other two (especially medallion), you know what's going on, you follow along on the journey really well, and you learn and grow with the characters as you go. I felt like this one wasn't written quite as well as the other two, simply in terms of plot. We loveloveLOVE Medallion, and we really enjoyed Shield, which is the prequel. I don't think this book (sequel to Medallion) is as good as the first.

Medallion by Dawn L. Watkins