Read George’s Marvellous Medicine free in the Little Reads app.
Roald Dahl's George's Marvellous Medicine is a gloriously naughty story for 7 year olds about a boy, a saucepan and a grandmother who has it coming.
George's mother goes off shopping in the village on a Saturday morning and leaves him on his own with Grandma. He has one job. Give her her medicine at eleven o'clock.
Grandma is not a nice grandma. She's a selfish, grumpy old woman, and she only turns properly horrible when George's parents are out of the house.
She tells him growing is a nasty childish habit. She tells him to eat cabbage three times a day with the caterpillars left in, because caterpillars give you brains. She tells him about gobbling slugs off the lettuce, and about biting an earwig quickly before it can bite you back.
Then she leans forward and starts whispering about magic powers, and fingernails dropping off, and teeth growing out of your fingers instead. George stops finding her funny at that point and starts being properly frightened.
So he decides to make her a new medicine. Something so strong and so fierce it will either cure her completely or blow the top of her head off.
The whole middle of the book is George going round the house with an enormous saucepan, tipping in everything he can find. Shampoo. A whole tube of toothpaste. Shaving foam. Nail varnish. Hair remover. Flea powder that says on the tin it'll make a dog explode. Then out to the shed for the animal medicines meant for the hens, the horses and the pigs.
Reading it aloud is where the fun is. Every product gets a name in capital letters and a label Dahl clearly enjoyed making up, and there's a rhyme in the middle that begs to be performed. Your reader will be shouting ingredients at you by the third page of the list.
A word of warning, though. George is mixing household cleaners and animal medicine in a pan and then giving it to a person. He leaves the bathroom medicine cupboard alone because he promised his parents he would, and that's in the book, but everything else is the joke. Whether that's funny or an idea in search of a kitchen rather depends on your child.
He's also eight, and he genuinely hates his grandmother. It may suit a listener on a lap better than a new reader going it alone.
For more Dahl at his most gleefully revolting, The Twits is in the library too. Mr Twit has hair sprouting out of his nostrils and his ear-holes, and he and Mrs Twit spend their days playing horrible tricks on one another.
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