In the New Yorker, Margaret Talbot says pretty much the same thing:
You can imagine what the designers were getting at. Dahl is darker and edgier than most beloved children’s authors. In “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the obnoxious children suffer ignominious comeuppances—one falls into a filthy garbage chute; another blows up like a giant blueberry—and these are observed with sadistic glee by Willy Wonka and the author alike. The trouble is that the designers went for the wrong sort of darkness. One thing that Dahl’s books for children are not is sexually perverse, or indeed sexual at all. (His macabre stories for adults, which sometimes feature sexual cruelty, are another matter.) And if the Stepford daughter on the cover is meant to remind us of Veruca Salt or Violet Beauregarde, she doesn’t: those badly behaved squirts are bubbling over with rude life.
This will always be the only cover for me:
Previously: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s creepy new cover