Week 5: The Witches (audiobook), by Roald Dahl (extra credit: 2)

 It's fascinating how cavalier the people are about the Witches and what they do. And the logic behind everything, from the witches' plans to how not taking a bath ever is the best solution to avoiding witches, is very much childlike in its simplicity, but that lends it a special credence from the perspective of a child. 

And while the witches are scary, and you would definitely not like to run afoul of one, they don't actually harm the children? The transformation into a mouse is so painless our main character almost doesn't notice he's been changed - the other child needs to have it pointed out to him. They technically leave the rest up to nature. And it's not really the motivation to harm and or torture children - it's to do something to stop them from being horrifically offensive to their noses. And that's it, that's the sum total of their plans with all the power of magic at their disposal, that we know of. Why they don't just all go into hermitage in the mountains like the witches in The Golden Compass I don't know, but I can imagine giving up your current standard of living for one persistent nuisance might be a little overkill.

If we want to get into depictions of good vs bad as seemingly presented in this story, we only have to look at the Grandma and the Grand High Witch. A 'good' woman is nurturing and doting, and considers the child and what they need as they teach them; a 'bad' woman is stifling and hostile, and only considers their wants and desires. That's probably too deep for what is essentially a silly-scary story about witches, but children do end up being influenced by such nuances, from real life and from literature.

I actually appreciate women being evil for evil's sake, as well as ugly people just being ugly. Ugliness is ok. Its a weak writer who insinuates a character's personality based on appearances rather than behavior, and I'd rather read someone doing something than a paragraph describing them and something the narrator saw them do at some point. More show and less tell please.

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