Billy and the Minpins | Roald Dahl | Penguin

Billy and the Minpins is a really short story.  Uncomplicated and rather straightforward, it actually threw me off because I was expecting some sort of relevation of what the monster was, or that Billy had simply been dreaming when he flew on a swan, as I was reading it.

Oddly, I think I seemed to have been conditioned to expect hidden messsages and twists in plotlines with the dramas, movies and books that I have come across the past few years, such as I couldn't enjoy the simple and clean story that Billy and the Minpins presented.

This edition of Penguin's The Roald Dahl Classic Collection contains illustrations by Quentin Blake - which I thought were extremely hideous when I read Roald Dahl as a child - but I now associate Quentin Blake illustrations with Roald Dahl and find editions with other illustrators unsettling instead.  The spines of this edition is a matt gold with black and white text and I felt the collection would look good on my bookshelf.