When I was just a wee little lad, full of health and joy…
… I was mildly amused by the book, but I’d outgrown it. It wasn’t read to me by my folks when I was a toddler. I didn’t see it until 2nd grade or so.
I can see how the book might scare kids, with the grizzly looking wild things rolling their terrible eyes and roaring their terrible roars. I think it relies on the delivery, on how it’s read to the child. This was my eldest son’s favorite story. I read it to him in a fun way every night for months on end. We had the whole book memorized. We still have much of it memorized, and he just turned 30. It’s been a while.
I loved this book as a kid, and still do.
Like Dendarii Dame, what I love most is the magical transformation of Max’s room into a wild jungle, and also that the waking world he returns to is warm and comforting. It’s the best kind of dream.
And, of course, the wordless Wild Rumpus is wonderful. (We had a “rumpus room” at mum’s place, and we still refer to it as such.)
I’ve read it to my youngest several times, and he seems to quite like it.
I always dramatize the reading, as it lends itself well to that.
As CairoCarol says, the language really is beautifully poetic and really should be read as a poem. I find it a real joy to read the book out loud to my kid.
Thinking about it, it’s probably one of the best examples of excellent writing and excellent illustration coming together into a perfect picture story book, where the words tell you things not shown and the pictures show you things not told, yet both complement each other.
That’s pretty much what Sendak said about childhood in general. Childhood is intense and terrifying and confusing, and a lot of kids spend a lot of time and energy just trying to figure out how to survive in a world that sometimes seems impossible to live in.
For a child, there’s no frame of reference for what’s going on inside and around them; that comes with experience they don’t have yet, so they feel everything, every bump and slap and slight and rejection, so much more intensely for not comprehending where it’s coming from or how to deal with it. At least that’s how it seems to me, I guess other people’s childhoods could be very different indeed. I still do feel things very intensely and painfully (even good things), more so than it often seems others do, so perhaps my level of that sort of response to the world has always been higher than average.
I was given the book at age 9, which was the end of the most idyllic phase of my childhood, and the beginning of the worst. I think it spoke to me because I was definitely the sort of child who acted out, who was under a lot of stress, who dreamed of running away to someplace where I would be appreciated, who very much needed to be loved, didn’t quite know how to show it, and often felt like what passed for love in my world just wasn’t right somehow. It was judgemental and conditional in a way love shouldn’t be, or that’s how it seemed from my side. I had a deep conversation with one of my abusers a few years ago when they were seeking forgiveness for transgressions against others, and chose to start with me as perhaps the most significant one. I got to see their side of the world I’d grown up in and which had shaped me, and we both realised how different two views of one situation can be.
Max is acting out for whatever reason (the movie goes into some detail about that*), rebels against attempts to rein him in, runs away into a rich fantasy world where he is king and beloved of all. But then at the end, he comes back home and realises that he is loved and appreciated there too, and just writing that is making me choke up. That last line in the book just punches into my chest, tears out my heart, wraps it in soft fluffy warm cotton wool and shoves it back in again.
*While Sendak’s story is more or less for children (though he says he never set out to write books for children, that’s just how they turned out), it’s much more ABOUT children, or at least about childhood, in a way that many children who read it can apparently really relate to. The movie takes that notion a step further and uses the monsters to personify various aspects of childhood and children’s personalities and issues. It is very much not a movie for children, as it has long boring bits in the middle that won’t engage them; it’s for adults who remember what it’s like to be children, or who need to be reminded.
The book came out the year I graduated high school. At one point, in college, I took it out from the library. I loved it, and remember wishing it had come out when I was younger. My mother used to read to me a lot, and I remember reading this book in her “voice.”
Agree with both the above posts, and have to say that I never experienced In The Night Kitchen until we got my daughter a video of animated Sendak stories which included it. As an adult, it kind of creeped me out. I just watched an interview where he’s describing his experience of writing it and what it’s based on, and it makes sense in retrospect, but it was just never part of my development, so I don’t relate to it as much. Also never read the third story in the trilogy, Outside Over There, though his description of its meaning sounds interesting, so I may yet check it out.
It’s funny how in spite of my love of WTWTA, I never really got into his other works as a child. I did, however, inherit a story he illustrated for the Dutch children’s author Meindert de Jong, called The Little Cow And The Turtle, and I read that over and over growing up. He also illustrated the book Shadrach, which I think is by the same author, about a boy who gets a bunny and struggles with the difference between his assumptions and intentions and what happens in reality. I didn’t encounter that one until adulthood, but could still appreciate the difficulty a child has when his internal world doesn’t match the external one in the way he wants it to. I think Sendak must have appreciated that too, because it’s very much relevant to what he says about childhood and children and how that influences his own writing.
Do you mean Julia Donaldson (The Gruffalo, Tiddler, Stick-Man, Room on the Broom, Tyrannosaurus Drip, etc.)?
Hell, yeah. I continue to be surprised that she isn’t as well-known to kids nowadays as Dr. Seuss was when I was growing up 50 years ago. There are few things more fun than reading one of her books to a group of preschoolers. Especially the books with Axel Scheffler’s illustrations.
I didn’t read it as a child. I did read it to my children. I loved it, for all the reasons people have mentioned above. But my kids weren’t wild about it. I think my daughter found it too scary.
For pure childhood fantasy, my favorite is Harold and the Purple Crayon. And my kids seemed to like that, too. But I don’t think it has the emotional depth of wtwta, which deals with the emotional conflicts of childhood.
As a child, I never found it more than mildly interesting for the story. I actively disliked the artwork. My daughter was not particularly fond of it, either.
WTWTA, ITNK, and the now out-of-print Outside Over There (on which Labyrinth is loosely based) were in regular bedtime-story rotation when I was a child. I liked them fine.
As an adult, I don’t really care for ITNK except for the art. OOT I think is lovely and weird and I read it to my daughter often.
WTWTA, though, is my favorite children’s book. I find it difficult to read aloud because I’m constantly tearing up. It’s so deep and beautiful and right and perfect, and the last line destroys me every time. The art is nice, too.
It’s about taming the demons inside you, it’s about recognizing what’s inside and outside yourself, it’s about budding independence and the defiance it manifests as, it’s about desire for control and competence, and finally it’s about recognizing that, while all that is coming down the line, right now it’s okay to be a small child.
A word of caution: Outside Over There is easily the strangest of the three books. If you found In the Night Kitchen to be creepy, you’ll find OOT to be even more so. I’d hardly consider ITNK to be creepy, but OOT is well into not-for-everybody territory.
FWIW, my son loves all three of them, and has since he was 3.
I’m not familiar with both ITNK and OOT. Might have to check those out for the grandkids I don’t yet have.
In San Francisco at The Mercado there used to be a store called WTWTA. It sold only WTWTA items (or mostly, it was many years ago). I was surprised there’d be such a store because I didn’t think there’d be enough interest to sustain it. It didn’t last. It must’ve been sent to bed without its supper.
Again I think the delivery in how WTWTA is read to kids can make a difference on if it’s scary or not. Max plays with the wild things, he controls them and then tells them to STOP!, and they do. Max is in control.
I’ve always liked it, but it’s not one of my favorites. Mo Willems’ Pigeon has been my favorite children’s book character since he hit the scene. I’m also fond of Eric Kimmel’s version of Anansi the Spider. I prefer In the Night Kitchen to WTWTA.
I remember having liked it reasonably well as a child. It’s sort of like the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off of children’s books, in story. But I liked Ferris Bueller more. (The Wild Things movie is a much different animal.)
That’s a cool point. It’s his fantasy, and in order to figure out what he’s got to figure out, he’s got to be in control.
One of my other favorite bits is the refrain line. Early in the book he tells his mother: “I’ll eat you up!” and gets in trouble. Just before he leaves, the monsters say, “Oh please don’t go! We’ll eat you up, we love you so!” It’s his fierceness, externalized, so he can understand it, so he can verbalize that the fierceness is tied to desperate love. (And to make it cooler, he’s taken on the role of the parent: when the wild rumpus ends, he sends the beasts to bed without any supper, just as he was sent to bed.)
There’s a lot to the book, and I wonder whether some folks who don’t care for it read it too quickly to notice all that.
Where the Wild Things Are was not a staple of my childhood, though I probably heard it once or twice during my later elementary years. It was, however, a staple of my children’s picture book reading experience, and we are better for it, I think. My daughter loved the language, the repetition, and the wild rumpus. My son also loved the wild rumpus, but he took comfort in the calm at the end of the book when Max “returned” to his room to find his dinner waiting for him, still hot.
Other favorites here were Goodnight, Moon, Harold and the Purple Crayon, and Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus.
I don’t remember reading it as a kid. Part of the problem is that by the time I was in first grade they were bringing in books from the 5th grade class for me to read. That’s not a brag, it’s just that I have very few memories from that young, and even fewer before first grade. The only kid books I really remember reading are There’s a Monster At The End of This Book and Let’s Go Froggy. I also remember one with an alligator hiding under the bed because it scarred me for life.
I so love that book! I used to read it to my little sister and brother.
It’s such a wonderfully engaging picture book.
I must get my hands on a copy before my youngest kid gets too much older.
My son also loved the wild rumpus, but he took comfort in the calm at the end of the book when Max “returned” to his room to find his dinner waiting for him, still hot.