Revolting Rhymes

Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl retells six well-known fairy tales in verse for 5 year olds, and every one of them goes wrong in a way the original never did.

What happens

It begins by informing you that the tidy versions were cooked up years ago to stop children getting upset. This one has no such plan.

Then off it goes. Cinderella is shut in a slimy cellar with rats nibbling her feet while her sisters swan off to the Palace Ball. She doesn't ask nicely for help either. She bellows at the Magic Fairy for a coach, earrings and a diamond brooch.

Jack swaps the cow for one bean, gets walloped with the handle of a vacuum cleaner, and eventually works out that the reason the Giant can smell him is that he never washes.

Snow-White's dwarfs turn out to be ex-jockeys who gamble away everything they own. She has an idea about that.

The rhymes rattle along at a fair old pace. Dahl is rude about absolutely everybody. Goldilocks is a "nosey thieving little louse" who smashes a chair and puts her filthy shoes on the clean sheets, and the narrator would quite like to see her locked up for it.

That's the fun of it. There's a grown-up sitting next to your reader being outrageous about characters they already know inside out. You do need the proper version first though, or half the jokes go nowhere.

It reads aloud beautifully. The lines are short, the rhymes are easy enough to guess a beat ahead, and there are plenty of capitals to shout.

Now for the bit you'll want to know before you start.

These are genuinely gory. Both Ugly Sisters have their heads chopped off on the page, and one of them bounces. The Giant eats Jack's mum. The wicked Queen sends a huntsman to bring back Snow-White's heart, then sits down and eats a heart she believes is the child's. Red Riding Hood whips a pistol out of her knickers, shoots the Wolf dead and turns up a few weeks later in a wolfskin coat.

There's some nasty name-calling too. The Prince uses a very unpleasant word for a girl, and it's there in full.

If your child gets upset by death, or takes fairy tales seriously, this will spoil the stories rather than tickle them. Other children find these exact pages hilarious precisely because they know how the real tale is meant to end. You'll know which one you've got at home.

What to read next

If the gruesome-and-funny mix goes down well, Dirty Beasts is Dahl doing the same thing to animals instead. The first poem has a very clever pig work out what bacon is actually for, and he does not take the news well.