thedailychannel.com — recommended books

Danny, Champion of the World
by Roald Dahl

Danny doesn't have any mom. He lives with his dad in a one-room gypsy caravan parked on his dad's filling station.

His dad tells great stories. One night after Danny has gone to sleep, his dad goes out secretly to poach pheasants. When Danny wakes up in the middle of the night, he finds his dad gone. Danny decides to take the car they had been working on earlier in the day and drive it over to Hazell's Wood, which is where his dad is poaching.

When he arrives, he searches through the dark woods, and finds his dad at the bottom of a deep pit, his ankle broken. He rescues his dad with a rope he found in the car.

The pit, as it turns out, was dug by the owner of the woods, Victor Hazell. Hazell is an objectionable man, really, an extremely unsympathetic character who is planning a pheasant shooting party for all the important people in the county.

To this end, he has imported and seeded the woods with 200 pheasants.

The rest of this suspenseful and exciting story, one of the best we have read, is devoted the plan for revenge concocted and carried out by Danny and his father, with the complicity of practically everyone in the village.

Poach your way on over to amazon.com and order Danny, Champion of the World (don't let the keepers get you).

reviewed by Joe and George Girton on February 1, 2001