Surprisingly less mean spirited than Dahl's books usually are, though with his normal amount of anti-fat bias. Thankfully, it's far from only fat characters who are punished for greed, so that feels much less insidious than it could be. The oompa loompas also feel less racist than I remember, given that they willingly followed Wonka back to the factory and seemed happy about this. I know that's not a great storyline to have written at all, the happy slave, but it managed to be absurd enough that I was never imagining any human culture that could possibly exist. It's helpful that at no point did I feel like Wonka was meant to be read as sane, or safe to be around, so nothing he did felt like it should be taken as a moral lesson.

Actually that made me like the movies a whole lot less. This is not a book about a brilliant chocolatier. It's fundamentally about Charlie, about how poverty is not a punishment given to those who deserve it, and about a love of life, and of food. The descriptions of hardship and starvation hit incredibly hard, especially for a children's book.

My only real problem with this book is that my copy had the first chapter of the sequel tacked on at the end, which I think took away from the effective, hopeful ending of this book. That's on me for reading it, though. The story ended where it should, I just wish the editors recognised that.