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Oh cool. I'll check it out. Yes, perfectly dark and weird. If I read this book in a vacuum - didn't know it won a Caldecott Honor and has been in print for 40 years - I'd think it was a book that would alienate readers. But it's beloved! The mystery of it resonates in a deep way with kids and adults alike. It's like magic. Sendak sometim…
Oh cool. I'll check it out. Yes, perfectly dark and weird. If I read this book in a vacuum - didn't know it won a Caldecott Honor and has been in print for 40 years - I'd think it was a book that would alienate readers. But it's beloved! The mystery of it resonates in a deep way with kids and adults alike. It's like magic. Sendak sometimes said that he didn't write for kids - he said he wrote whatever he wanted and publishers just decided his books were kids books and sold them as such. (Which is kind of silly because it was the infamous children's book editor Ursula Nordstrom who published him from the get go, but I get the gist.) He also talked a lot about how seriously we should take child readers. The two sentiments seem kind of in opposition to each other (I don't write for children. I love and respect my child readers.) but I think they coexist in all his work, and in nothing more so than Outside Over There. He's so tapped into a child's consciousness but not necessarily because he's trying to engage children. I think he's just exploring his own deep childhood stuff and both kids, going through it, and parents, remembering, recognize it.
Gosh, yes. It's amazing to watch children just get his work -- in a not-so-long-ago previous life I was an elementary school librarian, and it was like magic introducing Sendak to kids.
I read once that Nordstrom had intended to pair Sendak with Margaret Wise Brown, but Brown's unexpected death scuppered those plans. Can you imagine?! I mean, I adore his early work with Ruth Krauss -- where would he have gone without her writing influence -- but I can't help wondering what Brown & Sendak would have created.
Wow. That is something to fantasize about.