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Book Summary

Reviewed by Katherine Kearns

Roald Dahl's anecdotal autobiography focuses mostly on his unpleasant experiences at three schools. Between ages seven and nine, Dahl attended school in his Welsh hometown, where he and his friends declared war on the neighborhood sweetshop witch and were roundly caned by the schoolmaster.

Attempting to save her son from such beatings, his mother sent him across the Channel to boarding school, where conditions were even worse and the boys had only each other in a world of authoritarian and often violent schoolmasters.

At thirteen, he was graduated to Repton, where his athletic abilities and his size shielded him slightly from the general atmosphere of persecution, though he makes it clear that the headmaster was a genuine sadist. In this last section, Dahl also looks forward in time to his coming adventures in Africa, and allows himself some observations about how his childhood experiences shaped his later life.

Is It Any Good?

3

Roald Dahl's writing is, as always, unsentimental and often comic, but the story shows him being relieved of his innocence and forced into a world where mothers have no place. Because Dahl tells repeatedly of the cruelty of schoolmasters who constantly refined their caning techniques on him, some children will be saddened, and others enraged, by the unfairness of it all. These scenes clearly show the child's vulnerability in an adult world. But, unlike in most novels -- such as Dahl's own -- in this true story, the abusers never get their comeuppance. These are not reasons for children to avoid BOY, however; they may, in fact, be reasons children will respond to the book, which promotes the values of honest courage and determination. It also has lighter descriptions of teachers, such as the eccentric old bachelor, Corkers.

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