by Roald Dahl
A week or so ago, I expressed a certain set of expectations from Dahl. Specifically, a certain sense that a proper Dahl story should have a dark almost wicked side to it. While this quality was distressingly absent in Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Twits has it in spades.
The Twits is the story of two absolutely awful old stinky people who delight in tricking each other. It's a kids book version of a dysfunctional marriage. Clearly neither of these old stinky mean people make good protagonists, so we get monkeys. It's a kids book and kids like monkeys. So, this family of monkeys, who are captives of the dastardly Twits, need to escape in a clever monkey-like manner. Which they do.
On another note, I've begun to notice a theme in Dahl's kid material: all the villains have woefully bad personal hygiene. Dahl doesn't just say these characters have stinky breath, he goes to the lengths of describing moldy bits of cheese and slimy decaying sardines trapped in facial hair. I know kids like gross things but ew.
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