Where the Wild Things Are
Maurice Sendak
"I think I first read Where the Wild Things Are when I was about maybe three or four years old as a picture book with my family, and my parents read it to me. So that's probably now about 30 years ago, which is kind of scary.
It centers around a little boy named Max, and Max is at home, and Max is a mischievous boy, and he is misbehaving; and I think the phrase that Sendak the author uses is, "creating mischief of one kind or another." He is sent to his room without supper, and he is angry, and he feels a little bit wronged; and while he's in his room, he imagines a whole other world. He imagines himself journeying on a ship out to this world there the wild things are. Max at first - it's kind of an interesting thing for a little kid to do. He's not at all sort of cowed by these monsters. In fact, Max is the fiercest of all.
I love the book both for its writing and for its illustrations. So for the writing standpoint, I think that Sen - Maurice Sendak tells a wonderful story. As an illustrator, Sendak is really great. The drawings as a standalone basis are wonderful, but they also really - they really help tell the story, and they show things that are not depicted in the text itself. As an illustrator myself, I think that's really great; so he is showing you what he's not telling you, and the combination is very, very powerful.
It also has a pace to it that I think is really ideal for a child as a bedtime story. They can get kind of fired up and sort of brought home, and kind of soothed and put to bed. I would give Where the Wild Things Are a five-star rating. It's a classic of American children's literature. There's probably in our daily lives a lot of times when we wish we could imagine a forest growing in our room or in our cubicle or whatever it is, and sailing off to another country or another land or another universe."
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