Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (original 1975; edition 1964)

Fabulous. One of my favorites. ( )

I read this book (probably more than once) in elementary school and loved it! The fact that my dad worked for a candy company didn't hurt! :) ( )

When Willie Wonka announces that he's hidden 5 golden tickets to his fantasticly famous, but very mysterious, chocolate factory, Charlie Bucket wishes more than anything that he could be one of the lucky 5 winners. But Charlie is very poor and can not afford to buy any of the chocolate bars that conceal the tickets. Luck knocks unexpectedly, though, and he's up for the adventure of a life-time with 4 other kids - each of whom has at least one huge personality flaw. Violet Beauregarde is uber-competitive and has a nasty chewing-gum habit, Veruca Salt is spoiled rotten, Mike Teavee is a know-it-all who watches too much TV, and Augustus Gloop is grossly overweight and incredibly greedy. As the eccentric Willie Wonka takes the kids on a wild tour of his factory, each of the kids suffers dire consequences of their flaws.

This is my FAVORITE Roald Dahl book. Hilarious and fun - and it has a classic movie that makes me even fonder of it. I really enjoyed listening to Idle's fantastic narration of the story - though I wish he'd sung the Oompa Loompa songs instead of just reading them. But no one's perfect. I think I enjoyed this book just as much as an adult as I had as a child.

For more of my review, see my blog: http://rachelreadingnthinking.blogspot.com/2013/05/charlie-and-chocolate-factory... ( )

This book is a silly and fun look into Willy Wonka’s world of imagination. The characters teach morals that all students need to learn. ( )

This is the story of Charlie Bucket and four others who have won the chance to go into Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. This book is not only interesting and fun for students to read, but it also teaches good lessons about gluttony, pride, selfishness, and so on. ( )

I can't think of the words to describe how magical this book is. Magical and fantastically creepy. So I'm not even going to try. But if you have children you MUST read this book to them, or have them read it. You will not regret it. ( )

I've just reread Charlie for the first time in, well, a couple of decades and loved it just as much as when I was little: the excitement about the announcement of the golden tickets and who finds them, the anticipation when Charlie is unwrapping a chocolate bar, the joy and wonder of the factory, the absolute certainty that a Whipple-Scrumptions Fudgemallow Delight would be the most delicious chocolate bar in the world ever if only it existed...

While Dahl's story is as good as ever, this Kindle edition was a little disappointing. It reproduces Quentin Blake's fantastic illustrations, but appears to be based on an uncorrected OCR: "T" appears instead of "I" on a number of occasions, and in some places there are unnecessary hyphens from ends of lines in the print book and some sentences are split into two paragraphs where presumably they were split across a page break and other bits of odd formatting. It's careless and sloppy that it wasn't proofread and checked properly before being released in this format, especially since it's currently more expensive than the paperback from Amazon. ( )

Summary:
This book is about a boy named Charlie and his grandpa. This chocolate company decides to give away five golden tickets in the candy bars. Charlie receives the last ticket. He takes his grandpa with him to tour the chocolate factory. Charlie’s family is a very poor family. The other kids that won the golden tickets are very spoiled and rich. They do not view life the same way as Charlie does.
Personal:
I believe this book lets children believe in many different adventures of life. This story also lets me understand that no matter what life throws in your direction everything can get better. It also lets us use our imagination in our life. This book is very uplifting to children.

Classroom:
1. We would have an activity like maybe having to find some golden tickets in a scavenger hunt around the classroom.
2. We could watch the movie that comes with this book. We could also discuss what the kids think happens.

Roald Dahl was one of my favourite writers as a kid. I'm Matilda on our dish rota this week (every week we have different names on our rota, in themes: one week I was John Watson in our Sherlock week; another time I was Simon Tam in our Firefly week; in our awesome women of sci-fi week I got to be Mass Effect's Jane Shepherd!). So, thinking about the Roald Dahl classics I loved so much, I remembered I didn't get round to rereading this.

It's evil and grotesque and over the top and so funny. (I have to admit, of the kids, I'd be Veruca Salt. I'm spoilt.) I sort of can't believe this is recommended reading for kids -- although it's not without it's own sense of morality, it's judgemental and intolerant. At the same time, the riotous ridiculousness of it is exactly the appeal.

And if you can read it without badly craving chocolate, I take my hat off to you. ( )

I read a whole book in German!

This book was written by Roald Dahl. Wait a sec... isn't he the same guy who wrote [book:James and the Giant Peach|6689]? Yeah he is. And that's all you need to know, to figure out his angle. He's another one of those guys who likes to write about kids in fucked up food situations. Just a year after James..., Dahl couldn't be satisfied with just one boy and one peach; he had to write this little gem, about a whole group of kids having crazy things happen to them with food, like the one kid who gets sucked up into a chocolate syrup pump, and then the little girl who gets turned into a blueberry. I read this book before I saw the movie, and I was pretty sure that one of the kids was going to get eaten, since a lot of the classics like Hanzel and Gretyl have child cannibalism. (Is a witch eating a kid considered cannibalism, or is a witch sufficiently other-than-human for it just to be run of the mill predation?)Jack and the Beanstalk doesn't actually show cannibalism, but the giant (that means a giant human, right?) is such a connoisseur of human flesh that he can discern the blood of an Englishman from other nationalities. (does he go by family heritage, or citizenship? I wonder.) Even the kids' stories which don't have cannibalism still usually have somebody or something eating a child, like the Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, or the whale in Pinocchio. (Does that count? I think Pinocchio was still a puppet when he got eaten.) And even if the kids don't get eaten, there's usually at least some sort of completely surreal food antics going on (baking 24 blackbirds into a pie? Somebody call the ASPCA!; gingerbread men who come alive and go running through town; and don't even get started on The Nutcracker unless you have a day to spend.)

To my amazement, there was no cannibalism in this book. It turned out to be a sort of cautionary tale about safety in the workplace, and how NOT to go about executive recruiting. When I was little, my Dad worked at a factory which made industrial presses, and I remember two occasions when he came home and told us about somebody who was either killed or severely injured by a workplace accident. That was usually followed by a lecture about how the individuals in question hadn't been following some precaution or another, and how "the rules are there for a reason". (Yeah, like the rules that I have to pay a sizable fraction of my income to a bunch of old robberbaron families who own the "Federal" Reserve?) I was never allowed to actually go inside where Dad worked; it was too dangerous; so when this story started out with a contest whose prize was a tour of a chocolate factory, I thought they were all completely insane. Of course, a chocolate factory might be safer than a machine shop, but considering how this book plays out, I'd have to say it probably isn't.

Pretty soon into the narration, Dahl starts laying down the old class warfare themes: Charlie's family is poverty-stricken to the point that his grandfather has to go hungry, just to provide Charlie with enough to eat. But it's a weird sort of poverty, where nobody is suggesting that Charlie or any of his apparently-retired grandparents get a job. Later, when Charlie tours Wonka's factory and sees the Oompa Loompas, he demonstrates no particular compassion or identification for his bretheren in the exploited underclasses. Willie Wonka claims that he rescued them from a monster-plagued homeland, and they all work in the factory of their own volition, but the whole thing seems a bit dubious, and nobody probes too deeply into it. I was disappointed in Charlie for failing to do anything about the Oompa Loompa situation. They're small, and orange and foreign, and Willie Wonka seems to be taking advantage of them; the whole set-up smacks of racism and neo-colonialism in the worst way. It's hard to take Charlie's complicity as anything other than tacit endorsement of their exploitation. Whenever anything bad happens to the kids on the factory tour, the Oompa Loompas make up a song about how the kid totally deserved everything he got, and probably worse. On one hand, these songs seem judgmental and cold-hearted, but I can imagine how the misfortunes of these human children might be a salve to temporarily satisfy the seething Oompa Loompa rage boiling just below the surface. My big question for this entire book is: do the Oompa Loompas know that one of the kids on the tour is going to end up as their new boss? It is an incredibly insulting scenerio Wonka has constructed here. You've got the Oompa Loompas running the place with such skill that Wonka candies are considered the world's finest. At the top of the organization sits Willie Wonka, contemplating his mortality. He sees that he can't run the place forever, and he needs to start grooming an heir. Does he even consider recruiting from within, bringing one of those hard-working, experienced Ooompa Loompas up from the ranks into the executive suite? No... they are categorically precluded from any HOPE of career growth. Instead, (and here's the real knife in the back) Wonka decides to give the senior executive position to a RANDOMLY SELECTED KID! The story seems to end on a happy note, with Charlie literally breaking through the glass ceiling (what glass ceiling? he's a friggin' white male in the early 1960's!) and flying away in a magic elevator, bubbling with excitement that he's just become - at age 12- CEO of a transnational corporation. But honestly, Charlie's long-term prospects don't look good; this ending has workers' rebellion written all over it, and while I am absolutely opposed to planned economies and monolithic authoritarian states, I can understand how the Oompa Loompas' rage and humiliation could easily result in a Russian revolution-type uprising, where they seize the means of production for themselves and put Wonka (and maybe Charlie too) on trial for his crimes against their people. ( )

July 2012 Cover to Cover Book Club selection. Previously read (or had it read to me) as a child.

I was surprised by how little of this I actually remembered and how much more I remembered the movie (the older version with Gene Wilder). There's whole plot points added to the movie that aren't in the book at all. I also think Roald Dahl has some of the most child-centric humor of any author I've read. I remember loving his books as a child and not having any qualms about the just desserts that were often served up, while as an adult I'm a little taken aback by the brutality and callousness. Kids in the book club clearly enjoyed this (although there were a few who I think really knew the story from the movie versions), but I still struggle with getting them to think more deeply about the characters. Willy Wonka in particular is complex and deserves some exploration. I think the book has plenty of depth to work as a discussion title, but I would hesitate to do this again because so many kids had a hard time seperating the movies from what they had read. ( )

saw the films ( Wilder and Depp versions), don't own it, probably won't get around to reading it.

I had read the book when I was little, and now I read it to my son. It was really great. The look on his face when something happened to the children... untill only Charlie was left.
He couldn't get enough of it. ( )

My blog post is here. ( )

Summary:
A boy who lives in dark time works to help support his family, when miraculously he gets a candy bar that allows him to go inside of Willy Wonkas chocolate factory. He explores the world of candy making and the imagination that goes into it. He is rewarded at the end for his good heart.

Personal Reaction:
This book was very enjoyable to read. Charlie shows how with hard work you can be rewarded. He has an amazing imagination that allows him to escape from his world.

Classroom Extension Ideas:
1.Each child could draw a picture or describe their fantasy candy.
2. as a group activity children can pretend to walk through the factory and discuss their opinions on what the world would look like

A much darker version then the movie. I really enjoyed this. ( )

This is one of those books that is truly fascinating to read. Many of us go into thinking things from the movie starring Gene Wilder, but quickly realize that it has little to do with the original text of the book. I love this book and will continue to read it throughout my life because it is just a darn good read. It is fun to see what happens to the evil children that should know better than to act in the manner in which they do. This is truly one of my favorite children stories! ( )

The Good: The book is written well for its intended age group, vocabulary and structure-wise. And at least I couldn't hear the creepy Oompa Loompa's singing.

The Bad: I'm probably in the minority here, but I just did not like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (or its movies). Grandpa can't get out of bed to help the family, but if there's chocolate involved he's all spry and nimble? And sure, Charlie is the hero to root for, but what are your other options when all of the other children are atrocious? The book was definitely a cute idea, but just failed to deliver on just about every level for me. ( )

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory seems to be a cautionary tale for adults: why not to have children. It is very obvious that Dahl didn't care much for children (I have heard this many times, most notably from the accounts of the child actors from the movie version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory); this book just reinforces this idea.
The story was disjointed and far from pleasurable. I hated it as a child and I hate it now (though I enjoy the Gene Wilder movie version). ( )

Willy Wonka's Famous Chocolate Factory is opening. Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, Mike Teavee, and Charlie Bucket find wild and crazy things inside. I like the detail Roald Dahl uses when describing the chocolate factory.

It was okay, nothing exceptional. "Matilda" is still better than this one. It was a bit weird for me but all that sweets made my mouth water. i LOVE CANDIES! haha And I do love Charlie but Mr. Wonka, ahhhh, he's kinda sketchy. Not much to say about this book. ( )

This is a book about a young boy named Charlie. Charlie's family is very poor and even though Charlie loves chocolate, he is only allowed to eat very little of it due to their financial situation. Charlie's grandfather finds out about Willy Wonka putting out five golden tickets for children to come and tour the chocolate factory. Charlie wins one of the tickets and him and his grandfather, along with four other children and their caregivers get the chance to explore Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Mysterious acts happen once the two embark on their tour. This is a great imaginative book for children. ( )

Grades 3 and up (fantasy)
Charlie’s family is so poor they cannot afford food. Willy Wonka puts out five golden tickets and Charlie finds the last one. The ticket allows Charlie and Grandpa Joe to have a tour of the chocolate factory. The other four children are taken away because of trouble they get into. At the end, Charlie moves into the factory to be trained by Mr. Wonka.
Two movies, radio, plays, musicals
Millennium Children’s Book Award, Blue Peter Book Award, School Library Journal’s Top 100 Books of All Time