SLIS 5420
James and the Giant Peach tells the story of James Henry Trotter, an orphan who starts out living with his two horrible aunts. They insult him and abuse him and make his life miserable. But through a remarkable accident, he finds himself inside a giant peach with several giant insect companions -- an old green grasshopper, a gloomy earthworm, a ladybug, a spider, a glowworm, a silkworm, and a centipede. Their adventure has many of the same ingredients as Dahl's other works, especially at the start where James has to suffer at the hands of cruel adults. Some adults may be a little shocked when the giant peach rolls over James two aunts, squashing them flat, and the travelers cheer. Such gleeful and vengeful violence is not normally found in modern books for young children. Children, however, will probably love it. The rest of the story has more fantasy and maybe less social satire than much of Dahl's work, but it is nevertheless extremely entertaining for both children and adults. The group goes through terrible dangers and only James cool head and the skillsof the different insects keeps them alive. Dahl is so inventive and funny that you can't help enjoying it, and the audiobook is performed with gusto by Jeremy Irons. You may want to get this as a gift for young children, but I strongly recommend you listen to it first, especially if you could do with some cheering up.
Perring, Christian. [Book review of james and the Giant Peach] Retrieved from http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=1910&cn=156
James and the Giant Peach
Book Review by: Tyan Wyss Original Author: Roald Dahl
Summary rating: 4 stars (40 Ratings)Visits : 1974words:900 Comments : 0
after his parents are eaten by an angry rhinoceros you wouldn’t think things could get much worse for James Henry Trotter,
but this horrible happening is just the first of his woes. Up until he is four, James lives with his doting parents on the beach, but after their deaths is sent to reside with his nasty relatives, Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker. Always called horrible names and forced to do all the chores, James leads a miserable life for three years until something ‘magical’ happens.
A strange little man with bristly black whiskers and dressed a suit of green gives James a little bag. Inside, a mass of crystal-like stones the size and shape of rice sparkle mysteriously. These ‘crocodile tongues’ will allow marvelous things to happen! James is so excited he trips and the bag bursts open, the green stones sinking into the soil at the base of the fruitless peach tree. James wants to cry, but the next morning an amazing thing has happened. The barren peach tree has produced a gigantic peach that continues growing in front of his aunts’ eyes until it reaches the size of a small house. Ever greedy, the pair decides to sell tickets so the community can view the amazing fruit.
That night James visits the peach and finds a tunnel inside of it. He crawls inside and meets the most amazing creatures. They are all insects. There is an old-green grasshopper, a huge spider, a giant ladybug, a sleepy silkworm, a centipede, and an earthworm. All have swallowed the magic stones, growing to a large size and now have found a home inside the sticky peach. Anything is better than the two aunts’ garden! They greet James quite cordially and Miss Spider spins them all beds. The next morning the peach begins to roll much to the horror of Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker who are flattened
by the giant fruit.
The peach rolls out of the garden and heads for the sea where it lands with an enormous splash. The excited creatures are adrift and set for some sort of adventure, but the earthworm moans that they will certainly starve. James quickly points out that all they have to do is eat some of the peach—there’s plenty to last for weeks. Happy, they freely float for a long while until Centipede notices hungry sharks swimming in the water. James comes up with the brilliant idea that silkworm can spin rope and the voyagers can lasso the seagulls to take them away. The plan works and they drift away from the snapping sharks. All goes well until cloudmen let loose snow and hail and then attack them. The seagulls manage to pull the peach away and they escape the nasty cloud people.
They gently float towards New York City, where their arrival sends the city into pandemonium. The mayor of New York, in great fright, calls upon the president to send his army in to rescue the city from the monster. At just that moment Centipede bites through the strings until they drop right upon the spire of the Empire State Building. The citizens cry out that what they see is a UFO or a dragon or a Whangdoodle! The insects and James lean over the side and James urges the people to not be frightened. He introduces the creatures and the police help them down. In a reversal of fortune, everyone thinks the passengers on the peach are heroes! James shouts out that the peach won’t last and that it would be a tasty treat. All the children of New York line up to eat it and soon there is only a giant brown pit remaining.
Everyone on the peach becomes rich and famous. Centipede becomes Vice-President of a boot company, Silkworm and Miss Spider set up a factory to make ropes, Glow-worm becomes the light inside the torch of the Statue of Liberty, and James lives in the peach pit inside Central Park and welcomes all sorts of visitors. The children beg him to tell of his adventures and he decides to write it all down in a book—and James and the Giant 
Any who reads RoaldDahl becomes immediately aware of two important things. First, the author’s abundant imagination literally bursts the seams of traditional children’s literature, creating a fantastic adventure land for children. The second is that all children populating his books are victims of insensitive and often cruel adults. This reflects the horrible experiences Dahl suffered at the hands of his teachers while at boarding school. Born in Wales in 1916, Dahl was a RAF fighter pilot during WWII but was wounded and thus decided to become a writer. It was a fortunate thing since his books are still popular with children worldwide and several of them, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, and James and the Giant Peach have been made into successful motion pictures.
Twilight Book Review By Christina Cozzetto
I finally broke down and read Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, over winter break this year. Curiosity was my entire reason for reading it, but that curiosity came from several different sources. One was how the series as a whole has been touted as the next Harry Potter, and how there seemed to be a significant overlap in readership (but only among girls, I found out later). Since I love Harry Potter, reading the book thus made sense.
I was also curious about its popularity, and how many critics have said the plot is horrendously unhealthy and unrealistic (aside from the fact that it’s about vampires) due to its negative portrayal of female sexuality. Additionally, I wanted to find out why some critics considered the series to have a pro-life message.
The series, written by Stephanie Meyer, covers several years in the life of Bella Swan, a girl of high-school age who gets involved with the underground world of vampires after meeting and falling in love with the vampire, Edward Cullen. The series covers their relationship from their first meeting to their wedding and the birth of their first child. It is narrated mostly in the first-person by Bella, and takes place mostly in the town of Forks, Washington – which actually has received significant attention and increased tourism due to the success of the books.
I will come clean right now about how much I’ve actually read. The series is made up of four books, and I read the first and skimmed the last, with a three-minute Wikipedia search to figure out the missing plot. I apparently missed some Romeo-and-Juliet-style suicide attempts and angst. My sister read the first two books, was told that the fourth, Breaking Dawn, was actually the third, and got several hundred pages in without noticing. Plus, I was the one who told her she was reading the wrong book.
My first source of curiosity about this series was sated about 50 pages into the first book: the series has only one thing in common with the Harry Potter books, and that’s popularity. Any critic who thinks that Harry Potter readers will automatically love this series clearly has read neither. Ignoring any comments on plot, character development, or quality of the writing, the Harry Potter series is an epic adventure, while the Twilight series is, over anything else, a romance; hence its overwhelmingly female fan base.
With regard to plot, character development, and quality of writing, J.K. Rowling’s series easily wins in each category. In case the fact that I skipped half of the Twilight series didn’t give it away, I did not enjoy reading these books. The main difficulty I had with them was that I disliked the person who narrates the books. The girl has very few redeeming qualities. Normally, self-deprecation in a heroine works well at keeping the character real, but all that Bella’s self-deprecation does is to keep her annoying.
She has very little self-esteem, even after causing the most handsome and mysterious boy in school to fall in love with her. However, you don’t feel sorry for her; you just want her to shut up. Her defining character trait (her only character trait without Edward) is her clumsiness, which is ridiculous: Meyer might as well have tried to define someone only by a speech impediment. She exists as a person only through her relationship with Edward. Trying to decide what Bella was going to do with her life if she hadn’t met him is a difficult and pathetic task, since she shows no real interest in any subject or activity, or even any interest in her “friends.” If you’re not a member of the gorgeous undead, Bella Swan wants nothing to do with you.
But Bella’s lack of personality is only part of why any remotely feminist critic would dislike this series. For some background information, Edward’s family, by definition, is a set of “vegetarian” vampires: they only feed on animal blood, not that of humans. Therefore, just being near Bella, whose blood is referenced as Edward’s “brand of heroin,” is a huge challenge for him. It’s made even more difficult by the fact that Bella really wants him to bite her and turn her into a vampire, even encouraging him constantly to do so. The reader is led to believe that his resistance to her temptation is noble and romantic.
The critics have a point, and there is a clear argument that Edward’s desire for Bella’s blood is a metaphor for any male’s desire to sleep with his lover. Her own desires (and therefore female sexuality as a whole) are painted as impure.
What the feminist critics miss by focusing on the negative portrayal of female sexuality is just how inherently stupid Bella’s plan is. She doesn’t want to become a vampire to do all sorts of vampire things; she wants to do it so that she can be immortal like Edward and be with him forever, and in the process cut off every other aspect of her life. As a source for comparison, Edward was turned into a vampire in 1918 to “save” him from the Spanish Influenza, had no choice in the matter, and was an orphan at the time of his transformation. In other words, he was going to die if he had not transformed, and was utterly alone.
Bella, however, has parents, has friends (although they, too, are barely developed as characters), and is not actively dying. She pushes herself on Edward with the ultimate goal of being one part of a whole, and nothing else. (Cue the various “I can’t live without you” suicide-plot variations of the second book.) This plan would be equally repulsive and idiotic if Edward and Bella’s roles were switched: no one, male or female, should be living solely for the existence of another.
My third source of curiosity was answered in the final book. The reason for the apparent “pro-life message” in this series appears in that installment, when Bella becomes pregnant immediately after her wedding. The child is a half-vampire, half-human baby, who grows rapidly, meaning that it would be nearly impossible for Bella to carry the child and survive the pregnancy. Edward encourages her to abort the fetus, but Bella refuses, stating she feels a connection to her child.
This is all well and good, and is a somewhat legitimate pro-life plot point. However, it is during the delivery that it all goes wrong. Bella’s labor is long, painful, and gruesome; it nearly kills her; and she is ultimately saved only by being transformed into a vampire. Meyer’s description of this childbirth is horrendously overblown, turning the miracle of life into a bloodbath.
The worst part of this supposed “pro-life” message is the way in which Meyer (through Bella) ranks the life of the child over the life of the mother. This is a gross misinterpretation of what the pro-life movement actually stands for, as the idea of ranking the life of the unborn baby above that of the mother is one which the movement has been attempting to refute for decades. Meyer (hopefully unwittingly) adds significant fuel to the fire just by writing a few hundred pages about a mutant vampire baby.
Politics and plot quality aside – to be fair, I know why this series is so popular for teenage girls. My sister, who read the first book before me, explained it rather well. She said, “I completely understand why young girls like this book. Every teenage girl wants a gorgeous, mysterious boy to fall in love with her for no reason, and then risk his life to protect her.” She’s completely right, and the series serves the purpose of romance novels very well.
Therefore, I can only hope that the girls who read this story see it as just a story, and don’t begin to make their moral and political decisions based on anything Meyer writes.
Christina Cozzetto is co-President of Brown Students for Life.Read more: http://thebrownspectator.com/twilight/#ixzz0UWj4bXN8
Tuesday November 25, 2008
Book Review - Twilight
Twilight is a phenomenon; or that is what I hear. I began to receive emails about it a short time ago and the requests for a review have increased as the release of the Twilight movie has approached. Strangely, I get more requests to review teenage fiction than any other genre. I usually reply with an apologetic email saying that I do not review such titles. But because of the popularity of this series I decided to make an exception. With great trepidation and with eyes fixed firmly on the floor, I went to a local store and purchased the whole series—four books. I read the first volume, which I will review today, and left it to Aileen (the fiction expert in our home) to read the rest of the series.
Admittedly, this is my first foray into fiction written for teen girls. Actually, it is one of my first ventures into teen literature at all. When I was young I read books for children, but largely skipped over teen fiction, opting instead to dive straight into the history books. So I admit to being largely ignorant when it comes to this kind of book.
I found Twilight surprisingly well-written, at least for the genre. This is not to say it will be supplanting Jane Austen in the university lecture hall, but merely that it is readable and reasonably good as fiction. The dialog, the characters, the pacing, the prose—all of it, at the very least, is good enough that it does not detract from the story. This is more than I can say for many novels.
The book begins with seventeen year-old Bella Swan moving from Phoenix, Arizona to Forks, Washington, so she can live with her father, Charlie. Her mother, meanwhile, is traveling with her boyfriend Phil, a minor league baseball player. A too-typical teenage girl, Bella is convinced she is an ugly duckling when in reality she is a swan (the inspiration for her last name, perhaps?). Where in Phoenix she had been a social outcast, in Forks she is immediately popular and she catches the eye of several boys.
I’ll continue this plot summary by (lazily) quoting from Wikipedia: “When Bella sits next to Edward Cullen in class on her first day of school, Edward seems utterly repulsed by her. He even attempts to change his schedule to avoid her, leaving Bella completely puzzled about his attitude towards her. After tricking a family friend, Jacob Black, into telling her the local tribal legends, Bella concludes that Edward and his family are vampires. Although she was inexplicably attracted to him even when she thought Edward drank human blood, she is much relieved to learn that the Cullens choose to abstain from drinking human blood, and drink animal blood instead. Edward reveals that he initially avoided Bella because the scent of her blood was so desirable. Over time, Edward and Bella fall in love.” Without spoiling the plot, the book concludes with some page-turning action involving a vampire tracker (which, for those who are as ignorant as myself, is a vampire who tracks humans, not a human who tracks vampires) who seeks to hunt Bella as a sick kind of sport.
I am sure that the subject matter will immediately convince some parents that the book is unsuitable for their girls. This was my initial reaction—why would I allow my daughter to read a book about vampires? But I know there are some, perhaps myself included, who may allow an older teenager to read it. It is primarily to assist such parents that I write this review.
The book is relatively clean. That is to say that there is little explicit violence and no overt sexual activity. However, I think this bears some further discussion. While there is no sexual activity portrayed in the book, it really does ooze with a kind of teen or tween sexuality. The book is, at its heart, the story of a young girl’s sexual awakening. It may be that the tween reader will be sufficiently young and innocent that this is lost on her, but I’m convinced the older teenage girl will find it in the story. The most explicit sexuality is found in a brief discussion between Edward and Bella where they talk about whether they desire one another in that way and whether Bella has ever been with another boy. Edward declares that he may be a vampire, but he is still a man. The quiet sensuality is far more pervasive and, I would suggest, far more powerful. There is scene after scene where Edward and Bella gently stroke one another, softly and slowly running their hands over each other’s bodies, exploring, pressing their heads against each other’s chests to hear their hearts pounding, feeling electric shocks as their fingers touch flesh, twisting and cavorting with their lips on one another’s faces and necks. Bella is inflamed by Edward and, while there may be no explicit mention of sexuality, it is clear that she desires Edward—all of Edward.
Edward, meanwhile, has a creepy kind of love for Bella. As a vampire he cannot sleep, so he spends his nights sneaking into Bella’s room to watch her sleep (as if this is sweet, not perverse) and often follows her unnoticed as she goes about her business. He reveals that her scent—the scent of her blood—drives him wild. His overwhelming love for her is sometimes nearly indistinguishable from revulsion or hatred. There is part of him that wishes to hold her, to make love to her, and another part that wants to attack her and to drink her blood. In one scene she has been bitten and Edward needs to suck some poison from her if he is to save her life. After he does so he discusses both her taste and her smell and how enchanting it is to him. Is this love or is this perverse obsession?
While the love between the two of them is meant to be real, it also has a strange, unearthly quality to it. It also has an obsessive, idolatrous quality. Perhaps this is true of any love story, but I wonder whether girls are well-served by reading of a young woman who is so utterly consumed with her boyfriend that she seeks and desires and thinks of nothing else. She lies, she disobeys her parents, she does whatever is necessary to be with him. She is convinced that in this boy she will find her all-in-all. All she desires—to the point of wanting him to drink her blood so she, too, can be a vampire—is to be with him forever. She would rather be undead eternally than live without him.
I just don’t know that young girls will derive any benefit from spending hours reading and thinking about such an unrealistic, unobtainable, perverse kind of love. It glories in love that is forbidden, dangerous and just plain weird. The fact that the story involves vampires may be beside the point. My primary concern with Twilight, as I consider handing it to a girl of thirteen or fifteen or seventeen, is its sensuous quality. The lack of overt sexuality means that it is not an erotic book, but it is very nearly so. It oozes sensuality even without an act of consummation.
It is not insignificant that on the cover of Twilight is the simple image of hands—female hands—holding out an apple. This clearly evokes the forbidden fruit of Genesis 2:17, verses that are quoted at the beginning of the book. This represents not only the forbidden love between a human and a vampire, but Edward himself as Bella considers partaking of him. My suggestion to parents would be to leave this book on the shelf instead of handing it to your teenage girl (and especially your young teenage girl). At the very least, read it yourself and see if your conscience is clear before you hand it to her.
Postscript: Aileen read this book and promptly read the other three volumes in the series. Her assessment of the sensuality and the violence in Twilight: “that’s nothing compared to the other three books.” It should be noted, however, that Edward and Bella marry in book four and that they do so as virgins.
