Read Matilda free in the Little Reads app.
Roald Dahl's Matilda is a story for 6 year olds about a very small girl with very large opinions and two parents who wish she'd go away.
Matilda Wormwood taught herself to read at three. By four she'd got through the only book in the house, her mum's Easy Cooking, and learnt all the recipes off by heart.
So she asks her dad for a book of her own. He wants to know what's wrong with the telly.
That afternoon she walks to the village library by herself and asks Mrs Phelps where the children's books are. Mrs Phelps kindly offers to find her a nice one with lots of pictures. No thank you, says Matilda. She can manage.
A few weeks later she's read every children's book in the building, so Mrs Phelps gives her Great Expectations. It's too heavy for Matilda to hold up, so she reads it on her lap, leaning forward, feet nowhere near the floor.
That picture is the best thing in the whole book.
Dahl is at his most gleeful telling this one. He starts by explaining what he'd write on the school reports of revolting children, and he's rude about the Wormwoods from beginning to end. Your reader will spot straight away that the grown-up telling the story is on Matilda's side, which is a lovely thing to feel when you're small.
Mr Wormwood sells second-hand cars and packs the gearboxes with sawdust so they'll stop rattling for a hundred miles or so. Matilda tells him that's cheating. He tells her she's an ignorant little twit. She works out she can't win an argument with him, so she does something to his hat instead.
Two things to know before you hand this one over. The Wormwoods are properly horrible to Matilda, not just comically horrible. They tell her she's stupid and ignorant to her face and she lies in bed at night working out how much she hates them. Dahl means that to sting, and a child who's ever felt overlooked at home may feel it quite hard.
Her revenge is gorgeous, but it does involve a not-quite-five-year-old and a tube of Superglue. If your reader takes ideas literally, you might want to be in the room for that chapter.
School hasn't even started when the book opens, by the way. There's a great deal still to come.
If your reader enjoys a small person getting even with an awful grown-up, George's Marvellous Medicine is in the library too. George gets left alone with his grandmother for one morning, which is about as long as it takes him to decide that her medicine could do with improving.
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