The Twits by Roald Dahl
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The Twits will always have a special place in my heart. I even played the role of the Roly Poly Bird during a 'The Twits' play we did at school in year 7, in which I donned a plastic beak and an orange sequined leotard that gave me the flattering (!) appearence of an oompa loompa with a beak. The Twits really is a brilliant book, though. I loved it when I was younger, and love it even more than i'm an adult, mainly because I can now see the subtle underlying message. The Twits tells the story of Mr and Mrs Twit, a vile (yet hugely comedic) pair who are in their 60's. Mr Twit was always a twit - he was born a twit, explains Roald Dahl. Mrs Twit, however, had once been normal. She wasn't born ugly, and according to the author "had quite a nice face when she was young." Her 'ugly thoughts', however had taken their toll, and by the time she was an adult, she was as equally ugly as Mr Twit.

The story is full of laughs - it's very humerous - it has talking animals, villians and plenty of gross details (eg the worm spaghetti!) that little ones will thoroughly enjoy reading about. The illustrations in the book are brilliant - one that sticks in my head is the one where there's a picture of Mr Twit's 'food beard' - it has a picture of his beard with bits of food in it and little arrows pointing to each morsel of food with 'stilton cheese' 'tinned sardine' etc written next to the arrow. It's so gross, yet so entertaining! Roald Dahl goes into plenty of gory detail about the contents of Mr Twit's beard, which is summed up by Roald Dahl explaining "what I am trying to tell you is that Mr Twit was a foul and smelly old man."

Mr and Mrs Twit are definetly easily unlikeable and despite being the books main characters, are the villians. Despite being married, they both pretty much despise eachother and spend a majority of the book playing nasty tricks on each other/trying to get revenge, which is very fun to read about, and it's easy to laugh along and not feel guilty for laughing as they're both equally as unlikeable! The book is just brilliant. Kids find it hilarious, and it never fails to make me smile, even at the age of twenty. It's quirky and very silly, but it teaches valuable lessons (in a fun way which is very subtle) - the underlying message of the book is basically saying how beauty comes from the inside. I know kids are unlikely to pick up on this but I think it's worth maybe sitting down with them and explaining the underlying meaning if they're at an age where they are aware of the whole judging people by their appearence or weight etc.

The book is quite long (112 pages) for very small children to read by them selves (my ex's 3 year old used to love this book been read to him though) but i'd say children from perhaps five/six ish would manage to read it themselves without any issues as the paragraphs aren't too long and the text is balanced out nicely with fun illustrations. The various animals in the book are a nice touch and the story isn't very in-depth or complicated - it's a nice easy read and i'd highly reccomend The Twits.

The Twits is available from Amazon for a reasonable £4.01.