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• Summary: When Max puts on his wolf costume he begins to cause trouble and stomp around the house. It starts to drive his mom crazy so she sends him to his room without dinner. While he’s in his room he begins to imagine that it’s a jungle. Max then takes a boat ride until he reaches an island filled with scary monsters! However, he stares them in the eyes and does a magic trick and they suddenly obey his every order. They have fun and dance around the island. Even though Max enjoys the commands he gives the monsters he becomes lonely and so he begins his travels back home. By the time he gets home, he finds that his mother left him his dinner in his room, and it’s still warm.Personal reaction: This has always been a personal favorite of mine. The illustrations are colorful with a lot of motion. It also shows that there are consequences to misbehaving and that it never hurts to have a big imagination when you’re sent to your room without dinner.Classroom extensions: 1)Using mixed media, have the class draw, paint, or collage what they think they’re inner ‘monster’ would look like2)Have the students write a short story about where they would go and do by using their imagination like Max.

  5.00 out of 5

  funnybunny1185

• Classic, exciting story of Max and the Wild Things!

  5.00 out of 5

  kmeling

• Max gets sent to bed early without his supper for misbehaving in his wolf suit. As he enters his room, it becomes the far away land of the Wild Things. There are beasts and scarey wild animals, but Max is brave. He becomes king of The Wild Things and dances with the beasts. Finally, he becomes homesick and decides to go back home. When he gets back, his supper is waiting, anf it is still warm. This book is full of imagination and fun. Any class K-1 would like the story. I would reccomend it to others and I will use it in my classes. It is a great story to read before nap time or some time when you want them to settle down.

  5.00 out of 5

  menaramore

• Most reviews of Where the Wild Things Are do not focus on Maurice Sendak’s sexual orientation. And why should they? Max’s story is not about being gay or being straight. It’s about being little and feeling angry, then feeling big with the power of your anger. It’s about how that power eventually feels scary and exhausting and you want to be welcomed back and loved for being, once again, small. Sendak gives Max the chance to act out the wildness inside in a way that is not at all cute or kid-sized, but is actually wild. He could have been afraid of the wild things as they “roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth” but instead he commands them to “BE STILL!” and they “called him the most wild thing of all.” In contrast to the frenetic energy of Max’s “wild rumpus” with the monsters Sendak describes Max’s homecoming simply and reverently. Max sails “back over a year/and in and out of weeks/and through a day/and into the night of his very own room/where he found his supper/waiting for him/and it was still hot. Sendak has said several times that the book is about family, and specifically that the wild things were a take on the loud, cheek-pinching relatives that would descend on his house. But Where the Wild Things Are may be more about the relatives you never see at all - the parents. As novelist Brent Hartinger points out in his review of the recent documentary “Tell Them Anything You Want – A Portrait of Maurice Sendak” Sendak did not come out as gay until he was eighty. “His parents’ inability to accept his being gay — not to mention his being an artist — is part of why Sendak says in the documentary that he ‘hated’ them. He says they never wanted to have kids in the first place and were terrible at parenting, giving him a miserable childhood…Sendak told the Times that he lived with the same man, psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn, for 50 years, until Glynn's death in 2007. But he never told his parents he is gay and, while they were living, was terrified that they might find out. ‘I don't think I ever stopped beating myself up about [being gay],’ he says in the documentary.” The loneliness that Max feels, the longing to be at home may have been very real to Sendak, not just during his childhood but throughout a lifetime of hiding his personal life from his parents. But the absolution summed up so neatly in Max’s still hot supper, that - more than any monster or voyage - may be the real fantasy behind this classic book. As librarians, why is it important to know that Maurice Sendak (or Ian Falconer, Louise Fitzhugh, James Howe or Jacqueline Woodson) are gay? Well, you could argue that it’s not important, most of the time. But sometimes readers, whether for an assignment or just because they are interested, may request works by gay authors. Librarians should be able to easily find books in their collection that fit the criteria. The time to be aware of some possible answers to that question is not while the phone is ringing and you have three patrons in line, but as you read and learn about authors from reviews, radio stories and flap copy. If you are making a display of books by openly gay authors it does not do to leave off books by authors who are not just famous gay authors, but famous authors, period. Characters like Olivia, Harriet, Bunnicula, and Locomotion are, like their authors, not just part of one community, but widely known and widely loved.Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Print.Hartinger, Brent. “’Where the Wild Things’ Author Maurice Sendak Revisits Monsters in New HBO Documentary.” AfterElton. Logo, Oct. 13 2009. Web. Mar 21 2010. ( )

  5.00 out of 5

  Benuka

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