Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood don’t really like their daughter, Matilda. They don’t appreciate that she’s a brilliant and kindly person. She teaches herself to read at age three and—left alone on weekday afternoons—she walks to the library, where soon she’s finished all the children’s books and wants to start in on the grown-up books. Awed by this tiny person’s literacy, Mrs. Phelps the librarian helps Matilda find good books, and the little girl soon finishes more than a dozen classics, including Pride and Prejudice, The Grapes of Wrath, and books by Dickens and Hemingway.

Matilda learns how to check out books and take them home, where she reads them upstairs in her bedroom: “She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling” (21). Her mind wanders the world from books in her room. 

Matilda’s home is very nice because her father, small and buck-toothed with a thin mustache, is good at selling used cars. Matilda asks him about his work, but he calls her an “ignorant little twit” (22) and instead explains to his son, Michael, that the secret to selling a car with worn gears is to add sawdust to the oil, which makes the car run smoothly—at least until the buyer gets home.