James And The Giant Peach Analysis

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James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl is about a lonely nine-year-old orphan who lives with his two greedy aunts. Their names were Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker. What happened in the book is that an old man gave James a bag full of one thousand long slimy crocodile tongues that were boiled up in the skull of a dead witch for twenty days and nights with the eyeball of a lizard. When the tongues were released, they went in the ground and then into a peach tree. There was a peach that started growing and became the size of a small house. Inside the peach, there were bugs inside of it. There was a grasshopper, a spider, an earthworm, a centipede, a ladybug, a glow-worm, and a silkworm. Together they leave James’s aunts, by rolling the peach off …show more content…

Profanity is “the improper use of a sacred or divine name to express strong usually negative emotions such as anger or fear.” What was racist in the book was this quote: “I’d rather be fried alive and eaten by a mexican!” Some people thought the book should be banned because of the quote. But, one racist sentence is not enough to ban a book. The Times of London reported that James and the Giant Peach was once banned in a Wisconsin town because a reference to the Spider licking her lips could be "taken in two ways, including sexual." Other challenges to the book are a bit more conventional. The use of the word "ass" led to a 1991 challenge in Altoona, Wisconsin. One year later, a woman in Hernando County, Florida, took issue with Grasshopper's statement, "I'd rather be fried alive and eaten by a Mexican!", as well as references to snuff, tobacco and whiskey. Her complaints to her 10-year-old daughter's school principal led to review by the regional school board. The bad words in the book were not that bad. I’d say that the book can be read by 3rd graders. Students younger than 3rd grade should not read it because they won’t understand the words in it. In the movie of this book, the bugs work together, which teaches the kids to work together. James and the Giant Peach is a very exciting and wonderful book for all ages. It can be in a middle school library