Resumo de James And The Giant Peach

James and the Giant Peach

James and the Giant Peach is probably the most improbable of Roald Dahl?s books. It relies much on magic, coincidence and circumstance for its action. Having said that, it is also one of the most entertaining and child-friendly of his books, since children will be wowed by the wonderful characters and all of Dahl?s excesses in character sketches.

The book?s young protagonist is James Henry Trotter. His childhood is rather unfortunate, since his parents get eaten by a rhinoceros that had escaped from the London Zoo. James now must go and live with his aunts Sponge and Spiker, who look as their names would suggest. They overwork and starve him, and give him very few pleasures, not even permitting him to go down to the beach.

After one particularly hard day of chopping wood with no breaks, James begged his aunts for a trip to the beach which they again refused. He runs farther into the garden and bursts into tears. Then, a strange man who seems mad comes up to him and offers him a bag of small wiggling green magic pieces. He tells James that all his sorrows will disappear once he has used the magic correctly. James however, in his excitement, drops the bag and loses all the magic pieces into an old peach tree. He is even more heartbroken at this. But he is given no time to grieve since the peach tree beings to sprout a peach that grows and grows till it is enormous.

Aunts Sponge and Spiker decide to make a viewing off the peach to make some quick money. That day, James is not fed and is thrown out of the house at night. Miserable, he goes towards the peach and finds a tunnel made init. Following the tunnel, he comes to the centre of the peach, where he finds a number of insects that have eaten the magic green pieces as well and have become enormous. They make a plan to leave the garden and the huge centipede bits a hole in the stalk of the peach. As it rolls, it crushes Aunt Sponge and Spiker and finally lands in the sea.

Now, there is no place for the peach to go, as it floats serenely. But the troubles of its crew are hardly over. Sharks begin to attack the peach, and James, struck by a brilliant thought, gets the silkworm to spin copious amounts of silk and using the earthworm as bait, attaches the lines of silk to seagulls. After attaching a large number of gulls, he peach lifts out of the water and is carried into the clouds.

Now comes and adventure into another land of strange people. The peach?s crew meet the Cloud- People who are angry due to their invasion. The Cloud-People begin to throw hailstones at the peach, and by mistake, the peach breaks a rainbow that the Cloud-People are making. The peach must hurry out of this region and so it does, with only the Caterpillar getting coloured purple, but being washed off soon by the rain.

The next day, James realises that they have flown all the way over the Atlantic and are now over New York City. He tries to land the peach slowly by cutting off one gull at a time, but suddenly a plane comes and cuts through all the strings. The peach hurtles to the earth, making the city think that a bomb is being dropped upon them. But instead the peach lands on top of the point of the Empire State building.

The police and the firemen come to find out who are the strange creatures in the peach, when they are terrified by Ms Spider and the Ladybug. But James sings them a sing about all the wonderful qualities of all the insects on board, and they decide to help them to get the peach down. As the peach travels through New York, children beg James to eat some of the peach, which he permits. Ten thousand children run after the peach, eating away, until nothing is left but the stone in the centre, which is put into Central Park and is used by James as a house.

All the other creatures find jobs for themselves- the Centipede makes boots, the Earthworm joins the skincare industry, the Silkworm and Ms Spider make nylon thread for ropewalkers, the Glow worm lives inside the Statue of Liberty, saving people electricity, the Grasshopper joins an Orchestra. James in his peach stone house, decides to write a book about his adventures, and this is the story he told.

Even though the characters of the book are not typical children?s fiction characters, Dahl brings them closer to us by giving them characters to which children can relate. We begin to sympathise with the gentle nature of Ms Spider and the Ladybug and laugh at the fights between the Centipede and the Earthworm, with the Grasshopper as mediator. They even sing marvellous and crazy songs of faraway lands and foods. Dahl injects his traditional sense of reality as well, by making the Earthworm bait for the seagulls. All over, the book is a fantastic adventure to be read and experienced by all children.

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