Read The BFG free in the Little Reads app.
Roald Dahl's The BFG is a giant-sized adventure for 8 year olds about a girl who sees something she was never meant to see.
Sophie cannot sleep. A moonbeam is lying across her pillow, the other children in the dormitory have been asleep for hours, and she gets up to close the gap in the curtains.
Then she looks out instead. Coming up the street is something four times taller than a person, in a long black cloak, carrying a suitcase and a very long thin trumpet. It stops at every house, bends down, and peers in at the upstairs windows.
At the greengrocer's, where two children are asleep, it pours something out of a glass jar into the trumpet and blows.
Then it turns its head and looks straight at Sophie.
What happens next happens fast. An arm as thick as a tree trunk comes in through the window and Sophie is carried off in her own blanket, over fields and rivers and possibly an ocean, to a cave behind a rock the size of a house.
She is completely certain she is about to be eaten. She works through the options. Raw, boiled, or dropped into a frying pan like a rasher of bacon.
She is wrong, as it happens, but only about this particular giant. The others are exactly what she feared, and he is perfectly happy to tell her all about the Bonecruncher, who crunches up two people every night with a noise you can hear for miles.
Reading it is the pleasure of Dahl's words more than anything. The BFG's sentences come out sideways. Human beans. Cannybully. A crackety-crack you can hear across the country. Half the fun is your reader deciding they know exactly what a word means when it is not a word at all.
This is not a gentle opening, though. A child is taken from her bed in the night in the second chapter, by something with a fierce and devilish look about it, and she spends a long stretch afterwards believing she is supper. Dahl does it brilliantly, which is rather the problem if your reader is a worrier about the dark. Read the first three chapters together and you will know very quickly whether it is a thrill or too much.
For most children it is the thrill. A girl who was awake when she should not have been, whisked off somewhere enormous, and a giant who turns out to be on her side.
If that is the bit they love, James and the Giant Peach is in the library too. James is stuck with two aunts who beat him and call him a nasty little beast, and what rescues him is a peach the size of a house with company already living inside it.
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