By Roald Dahl
Matilda is four, reads Dickens for fun, and gets treated like dirt by her own family. At school she meets a teacher who adores her and a headmistress who terrifies the whole building — and then she finds out she can move things with her mind.
Matilda Wormwood is a tiny genius born into a family that can't stand her. Her father is a crooked used-car salesman, her mother lives for bingo and the television, and both of them treat a little girl who reads Dickens as some kind of personal insult. By four she's teaching herself at the library on her own. When she finally starts school she meets Miss Honey, the gentle teacher who sees exactly how remarkable she is, and Miss Trunchbull, the headmistress who runs the place like a prison. Trunchbull is a former hammer-thrower who genuinely loathes children: she swings a girl around by the pigtails and flings her over a fence, locks children in a cupboard lined with nails and broken glass called the Chokey, and forces a boy to eat an entire giant chocolate cake in front of the whole school. Then Matilda discovers she can move things just by staring at them, and she decides the grown-ups who've pushed her around have finally met their match.
This is the book that tells a child, flat out, that reading is a kind of power. Matilda's love of books is the very thing that makes her formidable, and a child who already disappears into stories will feel completely seen. It's also enormously satisfying in the way children want a story to be: the adults who belittle and bully her are dreadful, and one by one they get exactly what's coming to them from the smallest person in the room. Dahl never writes down to his audience, the chapters are short, and the plot pulls hard. It works as a first big solo novel for a confident reader and just as well as a nightly read-aloud.