Tuesday 5 March 2013

OTTIE AND THE BEA BOOK CLUB Meet to talk about FANTASTIC MR DAHL 27 February 2013

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This month, we learned a lot we didn’t know, about Roald Dahl.

We all agreed that he is indeed Fantastic. We hadn’t known that he was irritable – or so tall – or that he inherited so much money from his dad …
FANTASTIC MR DAHL is a non-fiction book, a biography of one of our favourite children’s authors written by Michael Rosen, who is also a very famous writer for children.

Not all of us had read a biography before, and on the whole we think that we prefer to read autobiographies (and in fact Maya has read BOY, which is Roald Dahl’s own autobiography). We worried about whether we could trust what Michael Rosen said, since he wasn’t there to know exactly what happened – and we weren’t sure that he needed to keep asking what we thought about things.

Grace particularly liked the pull-out pages which have lots of fascinating facts: one of our favourites was the fact that there are giant footprints leading to Roald Dahl’s grave!

We learned that a lot of sad things happened in Roald Dahl’s life, like his house being bombed and losing all his photographs and letters (Scarlett said she knew how that might feel – she couldn’t bear to lose her camera), and lots of exciting things too, like being a spy in the war (that was Grace’s favourite bit).

One thing we didn’t learn was when he learned to drive: because we were all very impressed to discover that he bought himself a motorbike when he was just sixteen, and used to ride it around from his boarding school. Bea explained that back when Roald Dahl was a teenager, you didn’t have to have a driving license in the same way. Perhaps he even taught himself how to ride the motorbike. You wouldn’t be allowed to do that now!

Scarlett really enjoyed this book – particularly finding out the alternate endings from when Roald Dahl first wrote his stories (we learned that Matilda was a baddy, which seems hard to believe now we know her so well).

It was interesting that Roald Dahl tried out so many things before he became an author. We thought it seemed that he was good at a lot of things, but was most comfortable with story writing. Giacomo noticed that it hadn’t been easy for him to become a writer – it was sad that his first book nearly got made into a film in Hollywood but then they decided not in the end. Roald must have been disappointed – but then we realized how many of his books had been made into excellent films, and that must have cheered him up!

We could understand how you might change your mind about what you want to be, though: Maya used to want to be a horserider, or a singer, but now she wants to be an actress. Rafferty liked learning that if Roald Dahl hadn’t been a writer, he wanted to be a doctor: Raf’s going to run a zoo with his friends when he grows up, he’s going to be the zoo vet, which sounds a bit like the beginning of a Roald Dahl story …

We liked that Roald Dahl took any good opportunities to try different things and see the world.

But really we discovered that most of his inspiration came from his horrible school days. Being a toilet seat warmer! Really horrible … Although we suspect he might have made it sound worse than it really was, for dramatic effect. Scarlett pointed out that although he said he hated his matron, there was the story of all the boys giving her a present: and you don’t really give presents to people you don’t like, do you?

We thought what it would be like to go away to boarding school aged seven. Some of us have been away on school trips to Rooters holiday camp, and we thought it might be a bit like that. It’s okay if you like the teachers, but horrible if they’re not.

We imagined boarding school how it would be if we ran it: Grace thought it would be good to have pet rabbits, and jelly beans for breakfast lunch and tea (we weren’t all so sure about the jelly beans – Rafferty would rather have Turkish Delight for pudding, and a balanced diet of bagel with pesto and a poached egg, and carrot and coriander soup). Maya added four poster beds, horses, and indoor swimming pool, a dance studio, a theatre - and a dressing up closet the size of a ballroom. Giacomo thought there would fencing, and prizes; and Scarlett wanted to go swimming in jelly beans. All of which sounds a lot more fun than Roald Dahl’s school!

So, you see, we learned a lot that we didn’t know - and had a lot of fun imagining the rest ...




See you all next month, when we’ll be talking about FIVE CHILDREN AND IT, which was written more than a hundred years ago by a lady who lived very near here, called E.Nesbit. Jacqueline Wilson has written a book inspired by her original story, called FOUR CHILDREN AND IT: I wonder how different they are?