Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish - reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!
Last week, I wrote about Cheddar Gorge since a novel I was reading was set there (turned out that I liked the fantasy travel better than the book). Tina shared photos from her 1999 trip to England, featuring Stonehenge in a rare thunder storm. Becky reviewed Slaves of Obsession, a William Monk novel, by Anne Perry. For children and winter, she also reviewed Peppa Pig and the Day at Snowy Mountain. Sim found us an amazing breakfast with a view and visited two traditional London markets. Mike shared the story about the Christmas truce on the frontlines of World War I, with reflections on how much of that might be true.
Rick is convinced that I put movies in our Netflix queue for no other reason than that they are set in London. Not true. I picked The BFG because it was on somebody's list of best movies in 2016. Of course, I cheered when the first scene showed the London skyline featuring the tower that houses Big Ben at Westminster.
The BFG is a live action (but with lots of movie magic) version of Roald Dahl's story about a Big Friendly Giant and his child sidekick, Sophie. For some reason, I wasn't exposed to Roald Dahl as a child. Possibly because I grew up in a small Midwestern town where neither my mother or the local librarian had much use for dark comedy in children's stories. So, all of my Dahl experience comes from movies. I was in college by the time The BFG was published, so that one missed me entirely.
Aside from the opening flyover, the fun oh-so-English part of this movie comes near the end when it's clear that only Queen Elizabeth, in her home at Buckingham Palace, can save the day. There are hilarious bits here involving corgis and the Reagans. Penelope Wilton (Isobel Crawley from Downton Abbey) makes a terrific Queen Elizabeth of the 1980s.
About Joy Weese Moll
a librarian writing about books
