My daughter asked me last Tuesday why the BFG talks funny. Not "incorrectly" or "strangely" — funny. And I realized I'd never actually thought about it before, even though I read this book myself in third grade and have now read it aloud twice as a parent. He just does. That's the BFG. He says "human beans" and "squizzle" and "rotsome" and you accept it immediately because Roald Dahl understood something fundamental: the way someone talks is who they are. The BFG doesn't talk funny. He talks like the BFG.
This is Dahl's second-best book. Matilda is first, fight me in the comments. But The BFG is the one that holds up best on re-reads, which is a different measurement entirely. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has higher peaks but more dated valleys. James and the Giant Peach is weirder but less focused. The BFG is the complete package: strange and funny and scary and surprisingly tender, with an ending that actually works instead of just stopping.
What Actually Happens
Sophie is an orphan who can't sleep. She sees something she shouldn't — a giant in a black cloak, walking through London at night, blowing something through windows with a long trumpet. The giant spots her watching and does what any self-respecting giant would do: he snatches her out of bed and carries her away to Giant Country. Turns out he's the Big Friendly Giant, the runt of the giant world, and the only one who doesn't eat human beans. The other giants — Fleshlumpeater, Bloodbottler, Bonecruncher, and their friends — absolutely do. They gallop off to different countries every night for dinner. Sweden tastes of "rancid butter," says the BFG. Turkey tastes of "bootlaces and old tires."
Sophie and the BFG become friends. He shows her his collection of dreams, which he catches in Dream Country and bottles like fireflies. He mixes dreams the way a bartender mixes drinks — a little nightmare, some golden phizzwizard, shake well. He survives on snozzcumbers, which taste like rotting fish and burned rubber, and frobscottle, a fizzy drink where the bubbles go down instead of up. The resulting whizzpopping is considerable.
Then Sophie hatches a plan to stop the people-eating giants, involving the Queen of England, the Royal Air Force, and a very specific nightmare delivered to a very specific window. It's absurd and it works perfectly.
The Language Thing
Everyone talks about the BFG's gobblefunk language, and yes, it's delightful, but what makes it work is that it's consistent. He doesn't just throw in random silly words. He has patterns. He reverses syllables (human beans, jumply). He invents terms that sound exactly right (whizzpopping, uckyslush, disgusterous). When he says something is "phizzwizardly," you know precisely what he means even though you've never heard the word before.
My son, who is four and not the target audience, still asks me to "do the giant voice." I make the BFG low and rumbly, with a slight pause before his mixed-up words, like he's translating from Giant to English in real time. Sophie I keep normal — slightly posh, British, practical. The contrast is everything. She's the straight man in this comedy duo, and Dahl knew it.
Reading this aloud is pure joy. The rhythm of Dahl's sentences is so precise that you can feel when to speed up and when to let a moment sit. When the BFG describes how dreams taste, or when Sophie realizes the full horror of what the giants do to children, the prose shifts. It gets simpler. Slower. Dahl trusted his readers — even seven-year-olds — to handle actual darkness.
The Scary Parts Are Actually Scary
Here's what I'd forgotten from my own childhood: the Bloodbottler scene is genuinely tense. He comes into the BFG's cave looking for a snack. Sophie hides in a snozzcumber. The BFG has to take a bite of the very snozzcumber Sophie is hiding in, and she's underwater in the vegetable's disgusting juice, holding her breath, while this massive giant chews inches from her head. My daughter grabbed my arm during this part. That's good writing.
Dahl never condescends. The people-eating giants are cannibals. They're murderers. The book doesn't shy away from this. It also doesn't linger gratuitously. It states the problem plainly and moves forward. This is the Dahl contract: I will take you seriously if you take the story seriously.
The giants themselves are magnificently horrible — each one a specific kind of bully, each one stupid in a particular way. They're what happens when you give cruelty a 50-foot body and no imagination. The BFG is bullied constantly, called "runt" and "squiddle," threatened and mocked. He survives by being clever and kind, which is a better message than most chapter books manage with their whole moral apparatus on display.
The Quentin Blake Factor
You cannot separate this book from Blake's illustrations. That scratchy, energetic line work — the BFG's ears like satellite dishes, Sophie in her nightgown looking fierce and tiny, the Queen of England in her nightie with her corgis around her feet. These aren't decorations. They're part of the text. My kids flip back to look at pictures they've already seen. The illustration of the giants sleeping in Giant Country, all sprawled and horrible, does more work than a page of description could.
Blake makes ugliness beautiful and beauty strange. The BFG is odd-looking but never grotesque. Sophie is drawn with about six lines total and is completely alive. When frobscottle makes the BFG whizzpop, Blake shows the Queen and the Heads of the Army and the Air Force all reacting, and each face is perfectly calibrated to show someone trying very hard not to acknowledge what just happened.
Why This One Lasts
I think The BFG endures because it's fundamentally about friendship between two lonely people who have no reason to trust anyone. Sophie has been let down by every adult system meant to protect her. The BFG has been rejected by his own kind for refusing to be a monster. They find each other by accident and save each other on purpose.
The ending — where Sophie and the BFG both get what they need, where there's an actual sense of justice and completion — is earned. Dahl didn't do this often. Usually his books end with a quick cosmic reset. Here, Sophie gets a real home and the BFG gets respect and a purpose. It's a happy ending that doesn't feel cheap.
My daughter wanted to know if giants are real. I said no, but people who refuse to be cruel when everyone around them is cruel — those are real, and they're usually the ones everyone else makes fun of. She thought about this. Then she asked what country tastes the best to giants. I said probably France. She nodded. "Because of all the bread."
That's what this book does. It lives in your head and changes the way you think about things. You start categorizing your friends by what kind of giant they'd be. You wonder what your dreams would look like in a bottle. You try to invent your own gobblefunk words (none of them are as good as Dahl's). You remember what it felt like to be small in a world run by people who didn't always make sense, and you remember the relief of finding one person who was kind.
"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it." — Roald Dahl