Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

Hey, Story Seekers!

Max has put on his wolf suit.

This is our first warning.

He's making mischief. His mother has had enough. Max gets sent to his room without supper, which ought to bring the evening to a close.

Instead, a forest grows in his bedroom.

Well.

That escalated nicely.

Where the Wild Things Are, story and pictures by Maurice Sendak, takes one furious little boy, sends him somewhere enormous, hands him a kingdom full of monsters, and then quietly asks what he actually wants once everything is finally going his way.

Readit has inspected the Wild Things and would like it noted that several of them have feet that do not appear to belong to the rest of their bodies.

Fair point. Check the cover.

Let's go where the wild things are.

Book Breakdown

Max is having one of those nights.

He's tearing around in his wolf suit causing trouble, and eventually his mother calls him a wild thing.

Max responds by threatening to eat her.

Bold strategy.

Bedroom.

No supper.

Then Sendak does something wonderful.

He lets Max go.

A forest begins growing in the bedroom. Trees take over. The walls disappear. An ocean shows up, and Max sails away to the place where the Wild Things live.

And these things are WILD.

Horns. Claws. Enormous teeth. Big hairy bodies. Human feet exactly where you were not expecting human feet.

But Max doesn't cower. He stares them down, becomes their king, and soon everybody is roaring and stomping through the famous wild rumpus.

Then Sendak does something even smarter.

He stops talking.

For several pages there are no words at all. The pictures take the whole job.

And watch what the art does across the book. Early on, the illustrations sit in the middle of the page with white space around them. As Max travels deeper into his wild world, the pictures grow. They push the white margins out toward the edges. By the rumpus, they own the entire spread, corner to corner.

Max wanted wild.

The book gets wilder right along with him.

Then Max has had enough.

Being king of every monster in sight turns out not to be the same as being where somebody loves you.

So he goes home.

And waiting in his room is his supper.

Still hot.

That's the detail that reaches back and changes everything before it.

For teachers and librarians: Lexile AD740L · ATOS 3.4 · Guided Reading Level J · DRA 24 · grades K to 3. Harper, 1963. Forty-eight pages, and the 1964 Caldecott Medal winner. Fewer than 350 words in the whole book, though "gnashed" and "rumpus" will be new to most of the room.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

There's a reason this one has lasted sixty years.

It doesn't panic when Max gets angry.

Nobody stops the story to explain that Max is having a Big Feeling. He is. We can tell. The wolf suit covers it.

What Sendak understood is that a kid can be furious with somebody they love.

They can want to run away.

They can imagine being powerful enough that nobody tells them what to do ever again.

And then ten minutes later they can want to go home.

Those aren't contradictions when you're five. Some days that's just Tuesday.

Now look at what Max does once he has total control.

The Wild Things crown him king. Nobody can boss him around. And what does he eventually do with that power?

He sends the Wild Things to bed without their supper.

Well, well, well.

Look who's running the household now.

Sendak doesn't underline that. He doesn't stop and point at it. He trusts you to catch it, and if you don't catch it this reading you'll catch it the ninth.

From a read-aloud standpoint, the rumpus is the whole test.

There are no words for several pages. None. You will feel unemployed.

Don't rush through it because of that feeling.

Look at the pages. Let the kid look. Make monster noises if the room wants monster noises. Stomp. Growl. Ask which Wild Thing they'd want to be.

Or say nothing at all and let them stare.

That silence is the gutsiest thing in the book, and Sendak could only do it because he drew it himself. He knew precisely when to get his words out of his pictures' way. Most picture books are made by two people who never met. This one wasn't.

And yes, the monsters are a little scary.

They should be.

If your kid is genuinely monster-averse, flip through it first. But Max hands young readers an advantage the whole way through.

He isn't scared of them.

If a boy in a wolf suit can boss around creatures with horns, claws and feet borrowed from somebody's uncle, we can probably survive the page.

Readit's Review

I need to talk about the monsters.

One has horns.

One has feathers.

Some have giant feet.

One looks like somebody took four different animals and forgot to check the instructions.

I want to know their names.

Also, Max gets a BOAT in his bedroom.

Nobody is talking enough about this.

If a forest grew in my room I would be worried for maybe five seconds.

Then if a boat showed up?

I'm going.

The wild rumpus is the best part because there are no words, so you can stare at everything and make your own noises.

I would be the monster hanging from the tree.

Maybe.

Actually, climbing trees with monster claws seems easier than climbing with regular hands.

I don't think the Wild Things are that scary, because Max isn't scared.

But I would not want one standing beside my bed at night.

That's different.

And I knew Max was going home.

Being monster king sounds fun, but eventually you need snacks.

What Others Think

Sixty years on, readers are still taking this trip. Goodreads shows 4.26 out of 5 from 1,088,427 ratings and more than 15,000 written reviews.

A million ratings. For a forty-eight-page picture book.

What comes through those reviews isn't really opinion. It's inheritance.

Tim Null wrote the whole thing in three sentences: "Wife and I read this to our daughter. Our daughter read it to our granddaughter. Our granddaughter will most likely read it to our great granddaughter."

Four generations of one family, one book.

Mark Lawrence: "My copy of this book is over fifty years old. It was read to me when I was tiny and I read it to my children when they were small."

Michael Finocchiaro gets at why it survives the fiftieth reading: "It is one of the most fun and rewarding books for a parent to read to a kid (lots of fun making dancing sounds and monster sounds!)"

Which jessica yeung can confirm, having babysat recently: "i swear, i read this book at least 30 times within a 4 hour time span."

Thirty times in four hours. That's a kid who has found their book.

Now the honest part, because there are two real objections and both are worth knowing before you buy.

Some kids find it frightening, and some adults never stopped. Nathan puts it about as plainly as it can be put: "I have no doubt that this book damaged me, psychologically, as a small child." Mischenko lands in the same territory but the other way round: "The pictures and illustrations can be a little scary at times, but they still remain incredible to me."

Both of those are useful. It depends entirely on the kid.

And some readers don't like what Max gets away with. This one has been going for decades. Fleegan's version: "The kid is a jerk and is sent to his room without supper. He proceeds to go to some magical place where these monsters live and he bosses them around and is mean to them. Then he gets back home...having not learned that being a mean jerk" has any cost.

If you're looking for a book where the misbehaving kid learns a lesson and apologizes, this isn't it, and you should know that going in. Max is never punished in the story and never says sorry. What he gets instead is supper, still hot, which Sendak clearly thought was the more interesting ending.

I think he was right. But it's a fair thing to want and this book doesn't offer it.

My favorite review on the whole page belongs to Sasha, who worked out what the book actually is: "I didn't realize this was The Odyssey for so long. It seems so obvious now." A voyage out, a monster, a long time away, and somebody at home keeping the dinner warm.

Belly Laugh Scale

2 out of 5: Giggle Territory

This isn't a comedy and it isn't trying to be.

There are funny-looking monsters, funny monster movements, Max's magnificent confidence, and a rumpus a committed grown-up can turn into something genuinely ridiculous.

But the book is chasing something wilder than laughs.

Anger. Power. Imagination. Missing home. Monsters with questionable feet.

Two out of five, and it doesn't need a third.

Though if your read-aloud turns the rumpus into a full-body monster performance, you may personally push that number higher.

I won't stop you.

Final Explorer Verdict

I'd put Where the Wild Things Are in front of roughly ages 3 to 7, with a judgment call for kids who find monsters genuinely upsetting.

It's especially good for children with big imaginations and big feelings.

And for grown-ups who don't need every emotion explained before the page turns.

Sendak lets Max be angry without making him bad.

He lets him want to get away.

He lets him be powerful.

Then he lets Max decide, on his own, that he'd rather be where somebody loves him.

The supper waiting at the end does more work than a page of explanation ever could.

Mom was angry.

Max was angry.

Home is still home.

That's an enormous idea for a book with fewer than 350 words in it.

So open it. Let the forest grow. Give the rumpus some room.

And when Readit starts explaining which Wild Thing would win in a wrestling match, understand that we have lost him for the evening.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit