It won the highest award - a Caldecott Medal - in 1964. It's been an opera, a ballet, and even appeared on a commemorative stamp. It's been more than 45 years since Maurice Sendak first published "Where the Wild Things Are," and it's entertained millions of children. But if you re-visit the book as an adult, you'll still experience its rare sense of wonder.
Even the drawings on the inside front cover are mysterious, showing strange star-shaped leaves in orange, yellow and purple. There's a monster and a boat on the cover, and big monsters with jagged teeth on the title page. But the monster's a really a tribute to the raw imagination of a little boy named Max. And if you look carefully in the drawing of the boy's house, there's already a picture of a toothy monster hanging on his wall - and it's labeled "by Max"!
The book describes the night that "Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind." And he's doing the things boys do - building a tent, hammering nails in the wall, hanging a teddy bear from a coat hanger, and chasing his dog with a fork. He's acting like a wolf, after all, and even tells his mother that "I'll eat you up." Not appreciating his role-playing, she sends him to his bedroom instead, "without eating anything."
I've been told that there's only 10 sentences in the book, but Sendak's illustrations say so much more. There's a peevish look on Max's face as he sulks in his room, but in the next drawing he's closing his eyes while something magical happens. "That very night in Max's room a forest grew," Sendak writes - and while the room is viewed from the same angle, there's now six skinny trees that are touching his ceiling! It's more proof of Max's imagination, but this may be lost on younger readers. When I read this book as a kid, I thought a forest really grew in Max's room!
Sendak's skills as an illustrator allows him to run with his own imagination. Soon there's more than six trees - there's green grass where his carpet used to be. The trees have gotten leafier, and there's new palm trees and exotic plants. The only familiar thing left in the drawing is the window and its shutter, showing a full moon glowing ominously. I like how the book's themes all come together. Suddenly Max's humble wolf costume has found it's way to the perfect setting!
The forest "grew and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around." I was disappointed as a child that instead of walking into the jungle, Max hopped into a boat instead, and first "sailed off through night and day" until he reaches...another jungle. But there's a poetry to the simple text, with the boy's whims conquering all of reality. His boat sails "in and out of weeks and almost over a year." And soon he's arrived "where the wild things are."
The first monster he sees is a pink sea dragon, with hair on its chin and short scaly arms, but the next page shows several more. "And when he came to the place where the wild things are they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws." Sendak's poetry is wonderful, repeating like a fairy tale even as it describes the supposedly terrifying monsters.
And the sentences continue across the pages, as though it's the pictures that are really telling the story. Max's scowl at the monsters and shows that he's not afraid, even before the text reveals that he tames with the magic trick of staring without blinking into their big yellow eyes. "[A]nd they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all."
Though the book is about monsters, there's nothing but triumph and wild celebration. The monsters instantly declare Max their king, and he proclaims that a "wild rumpus" should start. Everyone - monsters and Max - all howl and dance to the moon, and swing through tree branches. All the monsters admire Max, who rides proudly on their shoulders.
And when he returns home, his mother has left out a warm dinner for him after all.