Oh man. Another posthumous publication from the Dahl estate, this book was a pleasantly gleeful surprise. It’s a tiny book, 40 pages that take about 5 minutes to read, but what a gem!

I dove into this blindly, reading it aloud to my kids with not a smidgeon of knowledge about what to expect. Sure, I read the intro by Quentin Blake and knew that this was a story Roald Dahl had written specifically for the Dyslexia Institute, but that didn’t prepare me well for what lay in store. I had to catch myself several times during this one, laughing the naughty words out and needing to explain them to my kids! It made for a pretty giddy evening of story time.

This creative yarn helps give the broader audience a sense of what dyslexia must feel like to the person who has it. The new Vicar of Nibbleswicke had, with the help of the wonderful teachers at the Dyslexia Institute in London, overcome his childhood issues with reading and had become a success in his school and seminary. But now at his first parish, his nerves get the better of him, and his brain resorts to the old way of thinking…only this time his dyslexia is no longer visual but oral. Some of the most important words he says in a sentence come out backwards, and yet he doesn’t know he’s doing it. At one point he praises “Almighty dog” for example, and it just gets worse from there.

The situations in which the Reverend Lee finds himself are highly amusing, though the “naughty words” might keep the more prudish of readers from laughing. I guess I’m not a prude, because this one was downright hilarious.

Even with the humor, this book really did help me get a sense of the frustration true dyslexia must cause the person who has it, like my good friend who’s enrolled his daughter in reading therapy right now, so she needn’t suffer the same way he did throughout school. The therapy is working, and he’s enjoying a peace of mind he never had growing up.

The Vicar in this book eventually overcame his childhood dyslexia—and eventually his less common “Back-to-Front Dyslexia”—and this story was a wonderful PSA that such help is both possible and available. This topic was barely on my radar until a month ago, so coming across this delightful, lesser-known Dahl story was both timely and helpful, and I’d say it’s definitely worth a read. I plan to share it with my friend and his wife. I just hope she’s not a prude!

©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)