By Roald Dahl
A poor, hungry boy finds one of five golden tickets to spend a day inside Willy Wonka's secret chocolate factory, where the four greedy children who won the others each come to a memorably bad end.
Charlie Bucket lives in a tiny house with his mom, his dad, and all four grandparents, who share a single bed. The family lives on cabbage soup, and Charlie gets one chocolate bar a year, on his birthday. Then Willy Wonka, who owns the huge factory down the street and hasn't let anyone through the gates in years, hides five golden tickets inside his chocolate bars, scattered around the world. Find a ticket, get a day inside. The whole planet tears open wrappers. Four of the tickets go to horrible, greedy children. Charlie finds the last one in a bar he buys with a coin he spots in the snow. Inside the factory there's a chocolate river, an elevator made of glass that flies in every direction, and candy that ignores the rules of the world, all of it run by Wonka, who is delighted and more than a little unhinged. One by one the four other children do the exact greedy thing they were always going to do, the factory deals with each of them, and Wonka's tiny Oompa-Loompa workers pop up to sing a song about it.
It's a whole book about food nobody can eat. A chocolate river, gum that tastes like a three-course dinner, candy that never shrinks in your mouth — none of it is a recipe, it's just pure wanting, which is exactly why the child who thinks about snacks all day won't put it down. Dahl spends the first third of the book making you feel how hungry and cold Charlie is, so that one chocolate bar ends up mattering more than the entire factory does later. The chapters are short and each one yanks you into the next. The Oompa-Loompa songs are mean and a pleasure to chant out loud. And the shape of it is basically a countdown, four bad children picked off one at a time, so your child always knows how much is left. It's been dragging children who don't much like reading all the way to the last page since 1964.