Where the Wild Things Are

Max, wearing a wolf costume and behaving like one, chases the family dog with a fork and gets sent to bed without supper. Alone in his room, he watches it grow into a forest and then an ocean, and he sails for almost a year to the land where the Wild Things live, enormous, clawed, toothy monsters who roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth the moment he arrives. Rather than run, Max stares them down until they name him king, and the book's wordless center spread lets Max lead the Wild Things through a wild rumpus, swinging through trees and howling at the moon, before Max, now the one in charge of the fun, sends them all to bed without their supper too. Alone again and suddenly missing the people who love him, Max gives up his kingship, sails back across the year and the ocean and the forest, and finds his supper waiting for him in his own room, still hot.

Sendak both wrote and illustrated it, and the artwork itself acts out Max's expanding imagination, the pictures start small, boxed by white space on the page, and grow larger with each turn until the wordless rumpus spreads fully across two facing pages with no text or border at all, before shrinking back down as Max sails home. It suits children roughly three to eight, though Sendak refused to soften the monsters into anything cute, and some children do find the Wild Things' teeth and claws genuinely unsettling on a first read even as most come back to the book precisely because Max is never actually afraid of them.