The Twits / Roald Dahl ; illustrated by Quentin Blake.

Title :

The Twits

Author:

Format:

Books

Summary:

The misadventures of two terrible old people who enjoy playing nasty tricks and are finally outwitted by a family of monkeys.

Language:

English

Audience:

750 Lexile.

ISBN - ISSN:

9780375822421

0375822429

0375922423

Physical Description:

76 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

General Note:

Originally published: London : Cape, 1980.

Subject:

Humorous fiction.

Humorous stories.

Fiction.

First Title value, for Searching:

The Twits / Roald Dahl ; illustrated by Quentin Blake.

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Library	Audience	Home Location	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Central	Kid/Juvenile	Open Stacks Fiction	Open Stacks Kids Book	DAHL	Searching... Unknown
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Roald Dahl's thrillingly grotesque book for young readers is now available in a gorgeous new gift edition, featuring the deliciously wicked artwork of Quentin Blake.
Mr. and Mrs. Twit are the smelliest, nastiest, ugliest people in the world. They hate everything--except playing mean jokes on each other, catching unsuspecting birds to put in their bird pies, and making their caged monkeys, the Muggle-Wumps, stand on their heads all day. But the Muggle-Wumps have had enough. With the help of Roly-Poly Bird, they set out to get some well-deserved revenge.

Author Notes

Roald (pronounced "Roo-aal") was born in Llandaff, South Wales. He had a relatively uneventful childhood and was educated at Repton School. During World War II he served as a fighter pilot and for a time was stationed in Washington, D.C.. Prompted by an interviewer, he turned an account of one of his war experiences into a short story that was accepted by the Saturday Evening Post, which were eventually collected in Over to You (1946).

Dahl's stories are often described as horror tales or fantasies, but neither description does them justice. He has the ability to treat the horrible and ghastly with a light touch, sometimes even with a humorous one. His tales never become merely shocking or gruesome. His purpose is not to shock but to entertain, and much of the entertainment comes from the unusual twists in his plots, rather than from grizzly details.

Dahl has also become famous as a writer of children's stories. In some circles, these works have cased great controversy. Critics have charged that Dahl's work is anti-Semitic and degrades women. Nevertheless, his work continues to be read: Charlie and Chocolate Factory (1964) was made into a successful movie, The BFG was made into a movie in July 2017, and his books of rhymes for children continue to be very popular.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (5)

School Library Journal Review

Gr 2-4-Actor Simon Callow tackles one of Roald Dahl's most gruesome stories (Puffin, pap. 1998) with relish in this gleefully naughty audiobook. Mr. and Mrs. Twit are two of the most disgusting, nasty, and horrid characters in children's literature, from their repulsive looks (the story opens with a long, detailed description of Mr. Twit's unkempt beard) to the mean and horrible tricks they play on one another (Mrs. Twit enjoys hiding her glass eyeball in unexpected places and lacing the spaghetti with worms; Mr. Twit works for weeks to convince his wife that she has "The Shrinks"). Callow captures the dry humor of Dahl's narrative voice perfectly, and creates appropriately nasty voices for Mr. and Mrs. Twit as well. Unfortunately, the thick accents and loud tones of these voices often mean that the dialogue is difficult to understand. Still, Callow's able narration brings Dahl's ironic sensibilities to life, and a sense of satisfaction is inevitable when the terrible Twits come to an appropriately gruesome end.-Kathleen Kelly MacMillan, Maryland School for the Deaf, Columbus (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publisher's Weekly Review

In Dahl's typically outre outing, the repulsive, misanthropic Mr. and Mrs. Twit become the target of revenge by the Mugglewump monkeys--who have finally had enough. Ages 7-11. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Horn Book Review

The author's most notorious couple and the revenge-seeking Muggle Wump and his family carry out their carnivalesque antics in this reissue. From HORN BOOK Spring 2003, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Guardian Review

It might seem a bit basic to choose a Roald Dahl classic as the book I most loved as a kid. I might have picked something a bit more obscure, a little more erudite. Is there a War and Peace for under-10s? And if so, why aren't I pretending that I devoured it? But the truth is, The Twits - the bright yellow of my 1982 Puffin edition in particular - is the book most seared into my early memory. Intriguingly, because I am not someone who has taken to audiobooks, I was introduced to The Twits by my sister who read it to me; clearly my enjoyment was not diluted by that fact. My sister read while we were in the back of a car driving down a motorway. (Even typing that makes me feel nauseous. Perhaps children are immune to the seasickness of words unanchored on a page?) I know that it was night-black outside and raining heavily, and that we were hours late, after getting lost on the way back from a weekend camping trip. The panic of my father radiating in the car like cologne; The Twits being read to me as distraction. What did I love so much about it? That first time, the sheer antics. The book is skinnier than a newspaper produced in coronavirus times, but its 87 pages pack in japes galore and an overstuffed box of pranks. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I am someone who will print out giant photographs of my own face and stick them to the walls of my boss's office when she's out. I am 30 years old. The tricks Dahl's characters play are not so benign, of course. The book is the story of a married couple, Mr and Mrs Twit, who despise each other. They are spiteful and vindictive and both hideously ugly but - an important lesson here - they are physically disgusting because their inner souls are awful. As Dahl puts it: "If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face ¿ A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly." The only joy the Twits get is from doing the dirty on each other, playing grotesque tricks including mixing worms into spaghetti, throwing frogs into the other's bed, and lengthen their chair legs to make it appear as though one has shrunk. They are horrid to each other, but in thoroughly entertaining ways. The adult me is a great fan of dark humour and I do wonder if this budding element of my personality was what responded to The Twits. Knowing much more about Dahl now, the undeniably unpalatable elements of his person such as his well documented antisemitism, make it slightly more difficult to appreciate the dark undercurrents in his fiction. But I definitely found the macabre, sinister and disturbing aspects of his work refreshing. There are lighter elements too, because Dahl was so good at this mix of light and shade. Rereading The Twits now, I was reminded that there is also a lesson in it: how we can overcome our differences and achieve common goals by being kind to one another. In the book, a family of former circus monkeys trapped in a cage befriends a treeful of birds, and warns them when they are in danger (and vice versa). There are other books of Dahl's I remember enjoying as a child: George's Marvellous Medicine (my second favourite), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach (originally, by the way, a giant cherry), and very much so, his memoir, Boy. The Twits, however, remains No 1. Unlike so many of Dahl's books, The Twits has never yet been successfully adapted for film or television. It has, however, been turned into a stage play - one that I unfortunately missed, and I am still unhappy about that. There are plans for it to be part of a Dahl animation series on Netflix. I'm still not convinced, however, that any visual twists on Dahl's books can compete with the much-loved illustrations by Quentin Blake. The way he drew the beard of Mr Twit, which "grew in spikes that stuck out straight like the bristles of a nailbrush" (and virtually a character in themselves) I can conjure up in a second. Finally, The Twits has the most satisfying payoff. Which, quite literally, turns the reader upside down. If you know, you know. And if you don't, what are you waiting for?

Kirkus Review

The nasty streak that lurks in Dahl's stories for adults and children comes out with a vengeance in his characterization of Mr. and Mrs. Twit and the nasty tricks they play on one another. Dahl's first sentence--""What a lot of hairy-faced men there are around nowadays""--might suggest that the manuscript has been sitting in a drawer for a decade; but if so it hasn't mellowed. Dahl will lose most reading-aloud adults straight off with his description of all the disgusting leftovers more or less permanently lodged in bathless Mr. Twit's beard. Ugly Mrs. Twit with her ugly thoughts is no more attractive. She puts her glass eye in her husband's beer glass and ""cackles"" (she would cackle) ""I told you I was watching you. I've got eyes everywhere."" He in turn puts a frog in her bed. She feeds him worms for spaghetti. He, borrowing an old ploy, gradually builds up her walking stick so she'll think she is shrinking. To cure her of the purported ""shrinks"" he subjects her to a stretching--which, however, backfires for him. Then Dalai turns to the birds, whom Mr. Twit catches for his pies by putting glue on their tree branches. The Twits also keep a family of monkeys they train to perform upside down. At last the birds and monkeys do in the Twits with an ingenious punishment that fits their crimes. Dahl describes all this unredeemed viciousness with a spirited, malevolent glee that plays shamelessly, and no doubt successfully, to kids' malicious impulses and unmerciful sense of justice. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.