Where the Wild Things Are
Francis Spufford describes Where the Wild Things Are as ‘one of the very few picture books to make an entirely deliberate, and beautiful, use of the psychoanalytic story of anger’ in his discussion, The Child that Books Built. Spufford notes the transformation of Max’s room to, ‘the private forest of fantasy and the unconscious, from which Max journeys(in ”a private boat”) to meet the Wild Things of his Anger’. He goes on to detail why he doesn’t see the story as one of fright, ‘It didn’t occur to me to fear the bedposts bursting into leaf, or the terrible teeth the Wild Things gnash, or the terrible eyes that roll. I thought the end took away the risk from it all.’ Mr Spufford makes a great point in retrospect, but to a young reader discovering Maurice Sendak’s book for the first time, it can be very intense.
