Illustrated by Patrick Benson
After taking a slight break through the holidays, we decided to get back onto the Roald Dahl Train with a new title I recently picked up. In fact, besides this, we’ve still got seven more Dahl books on our shelves that we haven’t yet read! That dude didn’t write a crazy number of books, I know, but at this point, he seems incredibly prolific!
His final work, The Minpins is a special story published shortly after his death in 1990. It follows a boy named Billy who listens to the Devil (yup) and disobeys his mother by leaving the house and heading into the forbidden woods where he becomes hunted by a monster and makes some very special tiny friends.
So…a little bit about the Devil. The passage went thusly:
“Just then a funny thing happened. Little Billy began to hear somebody whispering in his ear. He knew exactly who it was. It was the Devil. The Devil always started whispering to him when he was bored.” (7)
The Devil then goes on to whisper to him a whole bunch of promises about the joys of life in the forest, and Billy obeys the Devil, disobeys his mother and scampers out through the window into the deep dark woods.
When I hit this point in my read-aloud to my kids, I honestly paused and said, “Wait, what?!” I told the kids that if the Devil proved right in any way or if Billy’s rewarded for his disobedience, we’d probably stop reading this one. Thankfully the Devil’s promises were nothing but smoke and he ends up being a bad guy after all, even though we don’t see him again hereafter. And while Billy ends up making some great friends in the forest and ultimately disobeys his mom right up into adulthood, we didn’t really find that out until the very end, so we finished the story anyhow. We did so, though, with a moderate understanding that it’s a bad idea to climb out of the windows at night and go gallivanting in the dark woods against one’s mother’s wishes. Now my kids know it, they won’t do it, and I’ve got one more “Parental Worry” to cross off the list.
It’s also a bad idea to listen to the Devil. Might have to wait a while to cross that one off.
I’ve always enjoyed stories about tiny folks, books like Gulliver’s Travels, The Littles, The Borrowers, and The Indian in the Cupboard—or stories about the small yet realistic worlds of animals like Stuart Little, The Wind in the Willows, and Redwall. This story was a pleasant surprise for me, then, to find that the Minpins are a tiny race of people who live in the apartment complexes that we giants know as “trees” and that they get around by flying birds to and fro (Benson’s bird illustrations were especially cool). I mean, who hasn’t fascinated about being a tiny person trying to climb a tree or survive life in a world 100 times its normal size? It’s quite a world that Dahl has created here, and the addition of the mysterious Red-Hot Smoke-Belching Gruncher makes it all the more exciting.
Ethically, this wasn’t Dahl’s best tale but it was very much his style and we enjoyed it all the same. This one’s considered a picture book, so it’s much larger than all the others we have on our shelves, but I’m glad we ran into it as it’s whetted our appetites for even more.
Next up for us is Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984).
©2023 E.T.
Read More from Roald Dahl:
- Adult Short Stories:
Over to You (1946)
Someone Like You (1953)
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (1977) - Children Fiction:
James and the Giant Peach (1961)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
The Magic Finger (1964)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970)
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972)
Danny the Champion of the World (1975)
The Enormous Crocodile (1978)
The Twits (1980)
George’s Marvelous Medicine (1981)
The BFG (1982)
Dirty Beasts (1983)
Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984)
The Giraffe, the Pelly, and Me (1985)
Going Solo (1986)
Matilda (1988)
Esio Trot (1990)
The Minpins (1991)
The Vicar of Nibbleswicke (1991)