Miss Honey tries to move Matilda into a higher class, but the tyrannical headmistress, Miss Agatha Trunchbull, refuses.

However, her parents emotionally abuse her and completely refuse to acknowledge her abilities to keep from getting frustrated, Matilda finds herself forced to pull pranks on them, such as gluing her father's hat to his head, sticking a parrot in the chimney to simulate a burglar or ghost, and bleaching her father's hair with peroxide.Īt the age of five and a half, Matilda enters school and befriends her teacher Jennifer Honey, who is astonished by her intellectual abilities. She immediately shows amazing precocity, learning to speak at age one and to read at age three and a half, perusing all the children's books in the library by the age of four and three months and moving on to longer classics such as Great Expectations and Jane Eyre. In a small Buckinghamshire village forty minutes by bus away from Reading and 8 miles from Aylesbury, Matilda Wormwood is born to Mr and Mrs Wormwood. In 2012, Matilda Wormwood appeared on a Royal Mail commemorative postage stamp. Time magazine named Matilda in its list of the 100 Best Young-Adult Books of All Time. In 2012, Matilda was ranked number 30 among all-time best children's novels in a survey published by School Library Journal, a US monthly. In 2003, Matilda was listed at number 74 in The Big Read, a BBC survey of the British public of the top 200 novels of all time. A film adaptation of the musical was released in 2022. The book has been adapted in various media, including as an audio reading by actress Kate Winslet, a 1996 feature film directed by Danny DeVito, a two-part BBC Radio 4 program, and a 2010 to 2011 musical which has run on the West End in London, Broadway in New York, and around the world. The story features Matilda Wormwood, a precocious child with an uncaring mother and father, and her time in school run by the tyrannical headmistress Miss Trunchbull. It was published in 1988 by Jonathan Cape. Matilda is a children's novel written by British writer Roald Dahl and illustrated by Quentin Blake.

Matilda book