Remembering In The Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak

This was the first of a new feature at my reading blog, Just A (Reading) Fool, called Monday’s Memory, where I will remember a book from my childhood.

In The Night Kitchen
By Maurice Sendak
1970
35 pages

I’m not even sure how old I was when I first read, or more accurately saw, this book, but I do know it is one of those books that has never really left me. So returning to it earlier this year brought with it a little bit of a cringe, because it was so creepy weird to me and I think heavily influenced my dreams as a child, and a smile as I read again “I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me. God bless milk and God bless me.”

Aside: Ironically, throughout most of my childhood, I was lactose intolerant so couldn’t even drink milk, so didn’t even drink milk. Still don’t really, although I use it with cereal.

Now it seems so obvious how Sendak pulled the reader into the story with his first sentence in those first five pages and panels: “Did you hear of Mickey, how he heard a racket in the night/ and shouted, “Quiet down there!”/ and fell through the dark, out of his clothes/ past the moon & his mama & papa sleeping tight/ into the light of the night kitchen?” How could the reader not be intrigued?

Of course, I only learned recently that others were not as intrigued as outraged when the boy fell out of his clothes into that panel on the fifth page of the book into a batter bakers were preparing. Sendak’s book was also a highly controversial book and is No. 25 on the American Library Association’s 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000.

I further learned from Robert B. Doyle’s 2004 book, Banned Books, while at the library earlier today that the book in its colorful past has been:

• challenged at the Elk River, Minn. schools because “reading the book could lay the foundation for future use of pornography” (1992)
• expurgated in Springfield, Mo by drawing shorts on the boy (1977).
• challenged at a school in Beloit, Wisc. because the book “desensitizes children to nudity.”

Of course, when I was a child, growing up in the 1970s, I didn’t know any of this. I just knew it was, as I mentioned earlier, a creepy weird story. That’s for what I would, and still do, remember it.

Does it still hold up to the test of time? And how. 5/5. Surreal. Freaky, but a good story with Mickey ending up in bed “cakefree and dried.”