69 pages • 2 hours read
Roald DahlA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood don’t really like their daughter, Matilda. They don’t appreciate that she’s a brilliant and kindly person. She teaches herself to read at age three and—left alone on weekday afternoons—she walks to the library, where soon she’s finished all the children’s books and wants to start in on the grown-up books. Awed by this tiny person’s literacy, Mrs. Phelps the librarian helps Matilda find good books, and the little girl soon finishes more than a dozen classics, including Pride and Prejudice, The Grapes of Wrath, and books by Dickens and Hemingway.
Matilda learns how to check out books and take them home, where she reads them upstairs in her bedroom: “She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling” (21). Her mind wanders the world from books in her room.
Matilda’s home is very nice because her father, small and buck-toothed with a thin mustache, is good at selling used cars. Matilda asks him about his work, but he calls her an “ignorant little twit” (22) and instead explains to his son, Michael, that the secret to selling a car with worn gears is to add sawdust to the oil, which makes the car run smoothly—at least until the buyer gets home.
By Roald Dahl
Beware of the Dog
Roald Dahl
Billy and the Minpins
Roald Dahl
Boy: Tales of Childhood
Roald Dahl
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory
Roald Dahl
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
Roald Dahl
Danny, the Champion of the World
Roald Dahl
Esio Trot
Roald Dahl
Fantastic Mr Fox
Roald Dahl
George's Marvelous Medicine
Roald Dahl
Going Solo
Roald Dahl
James And The Giant Peach
Roald Dahl
Lamb To The Slaughter
Roald Dahl
Skin
Roald Dahl
The BFG
Roald Dahl
The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me
Roald Dahl, Illustr. Quentin Blake
The Landlady
Roald Dahl
The Magic Finger
Roald Dahl, Illustr. Quentin Blake
The Twits
Roald Dahl
The Way Up To Heaven
Roald Dahl
The Witches
Roald Dahl