Picture Book Month - Day 24

Today's author is a classic - Maurice Sendak.  His most famous book is Where The Wild Things Are, winner of the Caldecott Medal in 1964.  He adapted his book to the stage in 1979 and it was made into a feature film in 2009.  He has written a children's opera, designed sets for operas and plays, produced an animated television show for his book Really Rosie and wrote an designed an animated sequences for Sesame Street. 

Where the Wild Things Are is probably most familiar.  It tells the story of a boy named Max who misbehaves and is sent to bed without supper. He journeys to another land: “And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.” Max is made king of the wild things, but he soon misses home and my favorite line is the very last:

“And [he] sailed 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”

  I love how this shows, that no matter how much a child may misbehave, Mom is always there waiting with a warm meal and love.

Chicken Soup With Rice, was included in the tv production of Really Rosie.  I just love this rhyming trip through the seasons of the year.  If you've ever caught the film, you won't be able to read the book without singing it as Carole King performed it! It begins:

"In January

it's so nice

while slipping

on the sliding ice

to sip hot chicken soup

with rice.

Sipping once

sipping twice

sipping chicken soup

with rice."

It's a wonderful trip through the seasons and all of the ways of enjoying chicken soup with rice.  My daughter's kindergarten teacher used this book all through the school year.

Bumble-Ardy is Maurice Sendak's latest book and his first solo work since 1981.   The books grew from an animated segment for Sesame Street by Sendak and Jim Henson.  It tells the story of a pig who has reached the age of nine without every having a birthday celebration:

Bumble-Ardy had no party when he turned one.

(His immediate family frowned on fun.)

So two three and four were on purpose forgot

And five six seven just simply were not!"

And so it went, until he turns nine and decided to throw himself a party at last :"Which isn't bad. In fact, it's fine."  Sendak is still the master of the picture book.