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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting follow-up to a classic, August 25, 2001
I remember in 2nd grade when our teacher read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to the class. It had such an effect on us that when we spotted Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator in the school library, we were all scrambling over each other to get it (I got it first). Looking back, while this book is still good, it lacks the central focus and charm that the original had. I did not expect the focus to be on the chocolate factory, since the title clearly says 'Great Glass Elevator'. However, the elevator only features in the first-half the book when everyone gets launched into space. This might have been a good idea for another book, but here it seems odd and rather dragged-out. With the second part of the book, the gang returns to Earth and mess around with Wonka-vite, an age-restoring miracle drug that gets badly abused. This part is much better, since we get to learn a bit more about the factory. Overall, I would have been much more pleased if Dahl had made the book longer and divided it into several seperate short stories. Together, the two seperate plots don't connect at all. Grandma Georgina also proved to be a bitter character and not sympathetic at all. Also, I hope that there is a version out there that still contains the original drawings in the book. Nothing against Quentin Blake, but the original sketches were classic.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
There are three reasons why THIS Dahl novel was not made into a film---George, Georgina, and Josephine, September 18, 2006
After reading the delightful Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, this sequel was an absolute let-down. The novel begins with the great Glass Elevator breaking through the ceiling of Charlie's (formerly Wonka's) chocolate factory and rocketing into orbit around the Earth. While beyond the reaches of Earth's atmosphere, our heroes---Charlie, Grandpa Joe, and Mr. Wonka---must deal with the malleable and voracious Vermicious Knids (pronounced "K'Nids"), aliens which resemble unfrighteningly hostile figs or turds with eyes. Far worse than these beasties, though, are the insufferable old folks whose twenty-year stint in their shared bed has made them less than useless. Charlie, Joe, and Wonka, with no help from Charlie's folks or other grandparents, save themselves and a US spacecraft from the clutches of the Knids and return to the Chocolate Factory, where the old timers stupidly overdose on youth pills, returning them to infancy or beyond. Charlie and Wonka race around trying to help these ancient parasites, who respond to this assistance with the thanklessness the reader comes to expect from these oldsters. At the end of the novel, the geriatric brigade finally leaves the bed when they have a chance to meet the President.
In short, these three are the most tedious, spiteful, unredeemable characters I've come across in children's literature and I hoped that they would be eaten by the Knids or the Gnoolies or even the Oompa-Loompas as I read this book. As it is, they (unlike the awful kids in the Chocolate Factory) learn no lessons and persist in their curmudgeonly parasitism from the first page to the last. Their presence throughout the novel rendered it a chore, rather than a joy, to read.
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20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing and Pointless, October 6, 2000
I've read the positive reviews for this book, and I just can't understand them. It's fairly obvious to me what happened -- in 1972, with the success of the movie version (1971) of the first book, the author probably answered the call for a sequel to the 1964 classic. Too bad. While the original is a timeless and charming (with a thoughtful message), this book is choppy, disjointed, and poorly written. Worse, there's just no point to it at all. Pages and pages are devoted to a rather silly saga of the elevator in space, which perhaps would have been marginally interesting in 1972, but badly dated at this point. That's the first half of the book. The rest of the book is wasted on the grandparents getting younger, then older, then younger again, by means of Mr. Wonka's concoctions. That really is all that it is about. Does that sound interesting to you? Again, no point at all. It just rambles on page after page as if Mr. Dahl's advance were based on the page count. Mercifully, the book ends. Nothing about the factory. Nothing about Charlie growing up. Nothing about Mr. Wonka teaching Charlie anything. I suggest you avoid it.
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