robert. wrote:JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH was removed from school libraries. Where is the outrage?
James and the Giant Peach is a popular children's novel written in 1961 by British author Roald Dahl. The first edition, published by Alfred Knopf, featured illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. There have been re-illustrated versions of it over the years, done by Michael Simeon (for the first British edition), Emma Chichester Clark, Lane Smith and Quentin Blake. It was adapted into a film of the same name in 1996 (with Smith being a conceptual designer) which was directed by Henry Selick, and a musical in 2010.
The plot centres on a young English orphan boy who enters a gigantic, magical peach, and has a wild and surreal cross-world adventure with seven magically altered garden bugs he meets. Dahl was originally going to write about a giant cherry, but changed it to James and the Giant Peach because a peach is "prettier, bigger and squishier than a cherry."[1][2] Because of the story's occasional macabre and potentially frightening content, it has become a regular target of censors.[3][4]
Dahl dedicated the book to his six-year-old daughter Olivia, who died from complications of measles only a year after the book was published.[5]
The theme of James and the Giant Peach is that it's never too late to make friends. Even though James loses his parents and his aunts are mean to him, he still desires to make friends who care about him, and he doesn't give up.