My son used to have terrible nightmares when he was little. Sometimes he would wake up screaming in the middle of the night. Enter Maurice Sendak with his wonderful little book! The closet is filled with clothes and toys, not monsters. The child’s bedroom is not such a scary place, after all. The nightmares faded away, along with his fear of the dark.

It also stimulated his imagination, and he began to do the “wild dance” with his teddy bears. (Not on the bed, young man!)

This book first came out in 1963, but it is a timeless classic that belongs on every child’s bookshelf.

Parents can read this book aloud to children as young as three years, and older children can read it for themselves by age five or six. The words are simple enough for beginning readers, but the ideas are complex enough to entertain adults. I still read it for myself once in a while. It was one of my son’s favorite stories.

I had no idea, when I bought this book and read it to my young son, that there was any controversy about it. The text and pictures simply helped my little boy to get over his fear of the dark and the imaginary monsters that lurk in the shadows.

I learned about the controversy about five years later, when I took a college course in children’s literature.

The problem was the illustrations, which Sendak drew himself and colored in drab tones of gray, green and blue. The children’s book publishers insisted that children’s books must be illustrated in bright primary colors with lots of red to catch the attention of little eyes.

The hero, Max, is sent to bed without his supper for dressing up in a wolf costume, chasing the dog with a fork and sassing his mother. He goes to his room, dressed in his wolf suit. There he encounters scary monsters, but not too scary. The monsters are really his toys and clothes. Max becomes the King of the Wild Things in his room.

They go on an imaginary voyage

”through night and day
And in and out of weeks
And almost over a year”

They dance around for a while, but in the end Max realizes that he misses his mother. She has his dinner waiting for him, after all, now that he has learned his lesson about misbehaving.

One passage reflects the way that adults often express their love for little children, but it is the “wild things”, the monsters in Max’s room, that say it:

”Oh please don't go
We'll eat you up
We love you so!”

But Max realizes that he wants his mother, so he leaves the wild things behind.

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Thank you so much for reading my Epinion!

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Recommended: Yes