George's Marvelous Medicine (From the Author of Willy Wonka)
"It would be simply awful, George thought, if his Grandma bashed up the roof as well. His father would be furious. And he, George, would get the blame. He had made the medicine. He had given her too much. Don't come through the roof, Grandma, he prayed. Please don't."
One morning, George's mother has to drive into town to buy some groceries. While she does so, she leaves George at home with his Grandma. He is instructed to give her her medicine at exactly 11 o'clock.
George doesn't like his Grandma.
"Most grandmothers are lovely, kind, helpful old ladies, but not this one. She spent all day and every day sitting in her chair by the window, and she was always complaining about something or other. ... She was a miserable old grouch."
George makes his Grandma a cup of tea. She begins to scold and belittle him.
First, she tells him that he is growing too tall, and that he should stop eating chocolate and eat cabbage instead! (George hates cabbage). Cabbage with caterpillars, slugs, and beetles! 🐛
Then his Grandma tries to frighten him, tries to lure him to her with tantalizing secrets.
"Some of us know secrets that would make your hair stand straight up on end and your eyes pop out of their sockets..."
George makes a dash for it! 😨 He manages to escape his Grandma in the kitchen, where he begins to formulate a plan...
"I'm not going to be frightened by her," he said softly to himself. But he was frightened. And that's why he wanted suddenly to explode her away! He wanted to shake the old woman up a bit."
So George tries to think up a scare when his eyes suddenly fall upon his Grandma's medicine...
"It didn't do her the slightest bit of good. She was always just as horrid as she'd been before. The whole point of medicine, surely, was to make a person better."
That's when it hits George -- he will make his Grandma a magic medicine! A medicine that would either "cure her completely, or blow off the top of her head."
So George takes out a huge stewing pot and heads upstairs to the bathroom. There, he starts to dump everything that he can find into the pot!
A bottle of hair shampoo... An entire tube of toothpaste.. "Maybe that will brighten up those horrid brown teeth of hers." A can of shaving cream... Nail polish... Hair remover!
Then he takes his stewing pot and goes into the laundry room. A box of laundry detergent... A can of floor polish... A carton of flea powder!
Then George goes into the kitchen to find the spiciest spices he can find. A tin of curry powder... A bottle of extra hot chili sauce... A bottle of horseradish!
Then George goes into their animal shed, where he finds a variety of animal medications! A box for chicken ailments... 500! giant horse pills! A bottle of pig medicine...
And -- as George saunters past the garage -- he throws in some engine oil, antifreeze, and a handful of grease 😄
Finally George takes the pot into the kitchen, boils up his concoction, and adds a coating of brown paint (to mimic the appearance of his Grandma's actual medicine).
The time has come: time for Grandma to take her medicine 😈
George gives the old lady a big spoonful of magic medicine, where its effects immediately take place.
"Up she went like a jack-in-the-box... and she didn't come down. She stayed there, suspended in midair, about 2 feet up, still in a sitting position but rigid now, frozen, quivering, the eyes bulging, her hair standing up on end."
Smoke starts to trail out of Grandma's mouth! Thick, black smoke! 💨 So George fetches a bucket of water to dump on her. Then his Grandma begins to blow up like a balloon! She deflates; suddenly Grandma jumps out of her chair.
Then Grandma begins to grow!
George's Grandma starts to stretch -- through the living room, through George's room, through the attic, until finally Grandma's head pokes through the roof! Yet she feels fantastic 😄
But Grandma is the one who begins taking credit for George's medicine. In an effort to prove himself, George gives some of his medicine to one of their chickens on the farm. First the chicken starts to shake... Then the thick, black smoke starts to pour from out of its beak! Suddenly the chicken jumps throughout the air until it, too, begins to grow just as Grandma did!
It is at this point that both George's mother and father, Mrs. and Mr. Kranky arrive. They catch sight of Grandma's head through the roof and are immediately frozen in fear! 😱
George's father also catches sight of the enormous chicken laying an egg the size of a football! It is then that he has a brilliant idea...
"That egg would make scrambled eggs for 20 people! Come with me!" Mr. Kranky yelled, grabbing George by the arm. "Bring your medicine!
For years and years I've been trying to breed bigger and bigger animals. Bigger bulls for beef. Bigger pigs for pork..."
And so they give a bunch of farm animals some of George's marvelous medicine! The pigs, cows, sheep, horse (and even the silly nanny goat 🐐), all become as big as houses! 😱
Meanwhile the family ends up having to pull Grandma through the roof with the use of a construction crane! Then she takes the enormous horse out for a ride and falls asleep in the barn -- the only place big enough for her now 😂
The next morning, George's father tries explaining yet another great idea that he's had: he wants to sell George's marvelous medicine.
"We will sell it to every farmer in the world so that all of them can have giant animals! We will build a Marvelous Medicine Factory and sell the stuff in bottles at $10 apiece. We will become rich, and you will become famous!"
There's only one problem: George cannot remember every, single thing that he put into his medicine 😅
So the two of them walk throughout the house while Mr. Kranky makes a list of everything that George used. They attempt to make a batch of medicine, but when they give it to a chicken, its legs become as long and skinny as stilts!
The father and son make a third batch and give it to a chicken, whose neck grows over 6 feet long!
Finally they make Batch #4 and give it to a chicken, but this chicken shrinks to the size of a newborn chick!
They ponder on what ingredients they could be forgetting when Grandma comes along, looking for her cup of morning tea. She sees George holding a cupful of his freshly-made medicine, mistakenly thinks it is tea, and ends up drinking the whole thing! 😰
"Mother!" wailed Mrs. Kranky. "You've just drunk 50 doses of George's Marvelous Medicine #4, and look what one tiny spoonful did to that little old brown hen!"
Suddenly steam starts to pour out of Grandma's ears! Then the steam stops, and she begins to shrink! Even when she reaches her previous size, Grandma still continues to shrink.
"By then, Grandma was the size of a matchstick, and still shrinking faster. A moment later, she was no bigger than a pin... Then a pumpkin seed... Then..."
Finally Grandma disappears completely.
"That's what happens to you if you're grumpy and bad-tempered," said Mr. Kranky. "Great medicine of yours, George."
Even Mrs. Kranky -- Grandma's daughter -- eventually comes to accept her absence.
"But she calmed down quite quickly. And by lunchtime, she was saying, "Ah, well, I suppose it's all for the best, really. She was a bit of a nuisance around the house, wasn't she?"
"George didn't say a word. He knew something tremendous had taken place that morning. For a few brief moments he had touched with the very tips of his fingers the edge of a magic world."
My review....
I grew up with author Roald Dahl, primarily because I wrote several book reports on his work during my school years. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Twits, The Witches... I have always enjoyed his unique creativity, as well as his capability to stay in tune with a more simplistic, childish nature 😁
Despite the book's simplicity, I found myself relating to George more and more. We have both found ourselves in living environments in which the recipients -- more specifically, one of the recipients -- puts a real damper on life 😅 His is his Grandma; mine is my mother-in-law. And you can take my word for it -- mother-in-law is just as heinous as the Grandma in Dahl's story.
"George was especially tired of having to live in the same house as that grizzly old grunion of a grandma."
"Never once, even on her best days, had she smiled at George and said, "How was school today?" She didn't seem to care about other people, only about herself."
Now, obviously I cannot conjure up a marvelous medicine the same way that George did, but viewing my predicament from a humorous perspective definitely put me in a better mood...
The illustrations were also extremely funny and charismatic 😄 These drawings were completed by Quentin Blake, and he certainly has an eye for caricatures!
I'm sure there are many who can agree: there should be more adult novels with pictures! There is nothing wrong with incorporating images; it saves the reader a lot of guessing work, and the author is able to simply show us the picture they were trying to convey.
Medicine can come in different forms, but this one is extra great as it comes with curing magically.