Readers' Challenge: Where the Wild Things Are

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak is such a near and dear book to my heart that I want everyone to love it as I do, but yet everyone's version of the story seems so different than my own. Sendak has supplied us with a simple story, with imaginative pictures, and yet each of us fills in the blank spaces with our own imaginations. To me, this makes it the best kind of story.

This leads me to Max, the main character in Where the Wild Things Are. Max is up to mischief and his mother sends him to his room, where Max's imagination takes him on an amazing journey to the land where the wild things are. Max becomes their ruler and they have wild times together, until Max realizes he "wanted to be where someone loved him best of all."

He returns home, and he finds "his supper waiting for him, nice and hot," a sign of his mother's love for him.

I related to this story as a child, with every fiber of my being, because I often took wild journeys in my imagination, and loved knowing that at the same time I had never really left my loving home. I climbed trees, sang songs and had dashing adventures, and then I could climb down from my favorite spots, walk across the yard and find my mom and dad waiting for me, with watermelon slices for lunch in summer and hot chocolate with a card game in winter.

Where the Wild Things Are is a book for daydreamers, for children and adults who know how to use this story as a jumping off point for their own imaginative adventures.