Boy: A Nostalgic Look at Roald Dahl's Childhood

Rivergal: Roald Dahl's experiences as a child were very intriguiging. Interesting connections from real life experiences would inspire his imaginative fiction. Highly recommend!

United States on Aug 03, 2023

Priyanka Das: A must read for every child

India on May 25, 2023

Mandy: This was a book my 8th grader had to read for school. They were studying the author. According to my son the book was boring and strange but he said that’s everything this author does. Ha!

United States on May 13, 2023

Jacqueline oakes: Informative book, pictures brilliant

United Kingdom on Mar 17, 2023

CloselyObservedEnglish: I liked this better than I thought I would, and it certainly offers insight into the life of this amazing writer!

United Kingdom on Jan 20, 2023

Tim H: Liked discovering his Norwegian family history, his experiences of public schools in UK and their terrible maltreatment of young children. He is so observant of human nature. His descriptions of the staff and fellow pupils are so poignant.

United Kingdom on Dec 10, 2022

Sai: Felt like I was in grade school library again reading this with my 11 year old. It's a good bizarre intro to expanding horizons of other cultures during different era's to this age group. Really fun to get him into the story to forget about the actual reading. We took turns reading after videogames and before bed so he didn't get burnt out and did a few chapters each night. His writing and reading grades went up and that was his goal . B to A-

United States on Apr 24, 2021

Anglian Traveller: This is the first part of Roald Dahl’s autobiography, covering his childhood years from birth in 1916 until working for the Shell company from 1934-36 on the eve of his departure to Tanzania on a 3-year posting (these years in Africa are detailed in the follow-up book, ‘Going Solo’).

Much of the book details his schooldays, including unhappy years as a boarder at a repressive prep school in Weston super Mare and subsequent time at Repton, where he eventually became a respected sports team ‘captain of fives’ and the squash team and the only-ever sports team captain not made a prefect due to his rebellious, anti-establishment nature.

Spliced in-between the schoolday stories are tales of the family’s annual summer holiday expeditions to Norway to live on remote idyllic islands for weeks at a time, a hair-raising first experience in a motor car driven by his elder sister who crashed and injured young Roald so badly that his nose was almost severed, and having his adenoids removed with a sharp knife and without anaesthetic by a local doctor, after which he walked home (!) with his mother.

Dahl is such an excellent writer that he makes everything...

United Kingdom on Jun 25, 2019

Jane: Roald went to a Welsh school for kindergarten. The teacher beat him with a cane. His mother then sent him to different English schools thinking they were the best schools in the world. But sadly, in every school he went to he was beaten with a cane either by teachers, headmasters, or boys with the title Boazer(Prefect). When Roald was a teen he was a star athlete. That usually would have made him a Boazer. But the administrators would not make him a Boazer since they knew he would not use a cane to beat younger boys. I think this was a horrible way of life in the schools back in the 1920s and 1930s. It was widespread. Many of the teachers and staff were cruel. Sometimes innocent boys were accused of things just to be able to punish them. To be caned, the boy had to pull his pants down. One Boazer was admired for his caning ability. He would hit the boy in the same spot repeatedly and often draw blood. The victim was required to stand with his pants down for several minutes while other boys would closely examine the caning bruises in minute detail. Of course his privates were also on display for all to examine.

There were other stories that were interesting and did not make...

United States on Jun 09, 2017

Timothy J. Bazzett: I have never read any of Roald Dahl's children's stories, but have always wanted to. His first memoir, BOY, is a very slight volume, less than 200 pages, but it is full of perhaps the most delightful and whimsical vignettes of childhood ever penned. While it is true there are some very shocking references to beatings and "canings" which were apparently quite common in English public schools, administered by both the masters and the older boys, the overall tone of the book is one of wonder and fond reminiscing. This is particularly true when Dahl talks of his home life, which was obviously a very loving albeit often unsupervised time, when boys could just be boys. Dahl's father, a very successful businessman, died when Roald was very young, but his mother, a Norwegian immigrant, kept her large blended family (6 children in all) very well, and stayed in Wales (then England) to raise them all, as her husband would have wanted her to. What I found most interesting in the book (although it was ALL absolutely wonderful) were the stories of young Roald's experiences at various boarding schools. These things happened back in the 20s, and yet many of these tales were so much like my own...

United States on Dec 15, 2008