There has been a renaissance in pop-up papercraft books in the last decade, in part due to the prolific and inspired work of Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart, whose works include Maurice Sendak's Mommy?, adaptations of Alice in Wonderland and Mother Goose, and collaborations on several excellent books about animals and mythic creatures and adaptations of the Chronicles of Narnia and Tomie dePaola's Strega Nona.

The career of pop-up artist David A. Carter doesn't fit in neatly with this movement. It's also somewhat schizophrenic, and a reader encountering one of the two strands of Carter's double life in pop-up books might be surprised to discover the other.

On the one hand are Carter's series of interactive books about cartoon bugs - lift-the-flap books, touch and feel books, and what seems like dozens of pop-up books. Inexpensive, rapidly released, and often with an unfinished feel (his recent Snow Bugs, which we received for review, featured a few pop-up pages that were poorly designed and barely functional; others, like a page featuring an ice skater who spins on an axle when a tab is pulled, are truly inspired). The primary limitation of these books is that they are designed to appeal to and be manipulated by young children, but are not very durable. This is a challenge of pop-up books in general, but in Carter's case, a lack of complexity in the papercraft and numerous pull tabs and windows make it clear that these books are intended to be aggressively handled.

But along with these, Carter has been slowly releasing volumes of a different series, one we find fascinating. The latest, White Noise, was released two weeks ago, and we have been playing with it ever since. The book communicates a mastery of abstract paper forms that are sure to elicit amazement from children as well as adults, but it's also a symphony of crackling, popping, and creaking that would make a chiropractor swoon. The book sounds like an old house, or a ship at sea, and its mysterious, subtle, and fascinating sounds give the book an almost otherworldly dimension, using an unexpected route to achieve the goal of any book: to draw you into a world your mind cannot resist exploring.

White Noise joins four other books in this series - 600 Black Spots, Yellow Square, Blue 2, and One Red Dot. But it's the sound that makes White Noise such an exceptionally interesting and engaging book.

But I've already talked too much. What I really should do is let this book speak for itself. Once the intro music is over, turn it up - our Flip cameras' mics can only pick up so much.


You can purchase White Noise on Amazon.com at a ridiculous discount for a new book of this physical quality. It is a steal at its current price of $13.44, down from a very reasonable list price of $22.99.

We received White Noise and Snow Bugs from the books' publisher. We will pass it on to a child who can use it, but will not donate it to a charity as we'd like to ensure it goes to a family who will care for it.

Are you ready to enjoy Halloween with your children? Here are a few Halloween announcements and notes from our family.

Halloween at our house

Z will be dressing up this year as a fairy riding a unicorn. It's a part-handmade, part DIY hack costume that makes use of the horse from her ladybug-cowgirl costume two years back and may end up incorporating elements from her hippo-princess costume last year.

We put up our Halloween decorations last night. These are all internal, as we live outside town and won't see any trick-or-treaters at our place. That means indoor lights (red/orange/yellow LED bulbs and a string of skeleton lights) and the decoration of a small purple fake Christmas tree with homemade Halloween ornaments (it also gets pulled out for Mardi Gras). As we decorated the tree, Z proudly noted each of the ornaments she had made, and asked which of us had made each of the others.

Win something Halloweeny

We've rounded up dozens of Halloween giveaways on PRIZEY. Most are still live, and users are adding last-minute ones to a rolling list. Take a look.

Great kids' media for Halloween

Jenna points us to a few great Halloween kids' books in an early Mini Media Mogul.

We're loving the DVD edition of A Very Brave Witch, which Scholastic sent to us at our request. The reason we asked for it, actually, was that it included the 1978 animated version of Tomi Ungerer's The Three Robbers, which you can see, for the moment at least, right here:



The premise of A Very Brave Witch, if you aren't familiar with it from the book by Alison McGhee and Harry Bliss, is that a witch has to be very brave to encounter non-witchy humans and their non-witchy ways. You can still get the book or the DVD on Amazon in time for Halloween. Or, you can put on a performance of your own.

Chronicle Books also has a sale in their own store - 30% off Halloween books with free shipping, through October 31. (That's an affiliate link there - we've joined their affiliate program to offer advertising on our sites, because we like so many of the kids' books they put out.)

Stay safe

The Consumer Products Safety Commission has some tips on keeping your kids safe on Halloween.

We love Halloween as the first of a fun-filled holiday season for kids and adults. We want to know how you're spending it. What will your child be dressing up as this year? Any Halloween traditions or events you're particularly looking forward to?

The high level of consumer expertise and inquisitiveness is one of our favorite things about regular ZRecs readers, and we've been reading into the Amazon purchases you make through our sites for a while now as a partial guide to what baby gear, sippy cups, kids' toys and books, and BPA-free water bottles you're thinking about, investing in, and willing to take a chance on. We realized recently that if we are able to learn so much from how our readers vote with their dollars, you could too - and we could learn more by asking you what you thought of these items now that you've tried them out.

That's the idea behind You Bought It, a new feature on ZRecs where we'll browse through the statistics of Amazon purchases made through ZRecs sites and invite readers who picked up some interesting items to discuss them. We'll highlight most-purchased items, products with strengths or weaknesses that seem to make or break products for some parents, and unusual items we only discovered thanks to your purchases.

In case it even needs to be said, all of the data we have on shopping through our links is completely anonymous. We have no idea who might have purchased what, or even what was purchased in combination with other items. Amazon works very hard to protect your privacy - what they maintain for us is a spreadsheet of what was purchased through our links. The sales of products through our sites helps fund our consumer research, advocacy, and independent product reviewing here on Z Recommends (as well as funding the care and feeding of our other blogs and the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products) - without it, we honestly wouldn't be able to do what we do. So this is as good a time as any to say - although we try to say it often - "Thanks!"

For this first round, we'll cover the period from June 1 until yesterday - a period which, for the sake of context, covers 1,095 items shipped. Further installments of You Bought It will cover about a month at a time.

Sippy Cups, Straw Cups, and Adult Water Bottles

More than anything else in the past few months, readers picked up sippy cups, straw cups, and water bottles. Here are some hard numbers.

Spending of ZRecs readers and passers-by on sippy and straw cups tends to cluster around some brands that are probably a bit less widely available, giving them a boost over the biggest national brands. (At least, that's what we tell ourselves about the fact that so few of you snapped up the Contigo AutoSeal, or the Playtex Insulator Straw Cup, through our Amazon links.) But the way that spending is distributed is pretty interesting anyway, in light of the recommendations we've made in this summer's Sippy Cup Showdowns.

Here's the breakdown of the top seven sippy and straw cups we saw the most activity for in that period:

• Tilty: 28 two-packs, or 56 cups, at $2.50-$5 per cup


• Innate MeMe: 22 sippys at $17 per cup


• Thermos Foogo Sippy Cup: 10 sippys at $16-$17 per cup


• Thermos Foogo Straw Cup: 7 straw cups at $12-$18 per cup


• Thinkbaby: 14 sippys at $9 per cup


• Munchkin Mighty Grip Flip-Top Straw Cup: 12 (in singles or two-packs), at $4-$8 per cup


• KidBasix Safe Sippy: 8 sippys, at $13-$15 per cup


• Nalgene Grip-n-Gulp: 8 sippys, at $7-$11 per cup

All of these but the Foogo and Safe Sippy were Top Picks in our Infant to Toddler or Toddler to Pre-K Sippy and Straw Cup Showdowns, and each of those middle-tier picks were voted up for inclusion in the Top Picks in our end-of-round reader polls.

What we most want to know is: How do all you Tilty shoppers like your super-cool, super cheap new sippy cups? Any complaints or surprises? Or are you as thrilled about them as we are?

By the way, at least a few of you also liked the look of the Rubbermaid Litterless Juice Box, which we named the World's Worst Straw Cup - 5 of those sold, too, a reflection of the disagreement among readers over our assessment of it. This is what they mean when they say "any publicity is good publicity," and why companies are still willing to send us products to review even though we don't promise to say only nice things.

For adult water bottles, the score was Camelbak 28 (for the BPA-Free Better Bottles - gotta love that bite valve - and Performance Bottles, with prices ranging from $8-$14 apiece), Thinksport 25 (a double-walled, fantastically-insulating, tank of a stainless steel sport bottle, selling for $16-$18 apiece) and Nalgene 8 (for their Tritan OTG bottles and wide-mouth bottles, $10-$12 apiece). A few of you bought Nathan stainless steel straw bottles, which we've never written about.

A couple of you bought these "Insta-Sip" screw-on sippy adapters for bottled water bottles. We were scratching our heads when we arrived at the product's page on Amazon and saw that fully half of Amazon shoppers who viewed these purchased them at $15 for two little sippy lids instead of the item suggested below the product image, a $3 alternative by Gerber. Then we realized the reason was probably because the Insta-Sip is labeled on Amazon in the product details as containing no polycarbonate plastic (and thus, presumably, being BPA-free) while the Gerber product description was silent on the issue.

This is typical of Gerber's unilaterally asleep-at-the-wheel behavior when it comes to providing definitive, trustworthy information regarding the BPA status of their products. (In case you were wondering why the vast majority of the many Gerber sippy and straw cups on the market were absent from our Sippy and Straw Cup Showdowns, well, every time we call customer service they tell us something different, and no one else there will talk to us.) Memo to Gerber: The fact that a product priced at five times what you charge for a similar item is matching you on sales is proof that you are HEMORRHAGING MONEY by acting like no one has ever heard about BPA. Genie, bottle, out. Join us.

Other Stuff You Bought The Most

It shouldn't surprise any long-term readers of Z Recommends or users of the ZRecs Guide that our readers buy a lot of children's feeding items. Munchie Mugs, Boon Snack Balls, and BabyBjorn plate and spoon sets are all items we love that were frequently purchased. The Munchie Mug is the best toddler-accessible snack carrier we've ever used, the Snack Ball is the most fun and whimsical, and the BabyBjorn plate has a great design for making it easier for kids to self feed, thanks to its genuinely non-skid base and unique shape. We saw a handful of each of these items purchased in the last couple months.

If any of you BabyBjorn plate users haven't noticed yet, the white part of the bowl pops out of the base for cleaning. It took us a while to figure that out!

We also saw purchases of several Booginhead SippiGrips, which we had never seen before. The SippiGrip is a sippy cup tether (seen plenty of those) but for some reason these things sell. My question - for any of you who purchased these, or have used them - it promises that it has a "unique grip material," but does it work as advertised? Any chance it makes your child throw their cup more - and can they haul it back up themselves once they've done so? Inquiring minds want to know.

Several of you also picked up Munchkin snack catchers, which we've never reviewed but always planned to, because we really dislike them. (We did give it two stars in the ZRecs Guide, but a video of its failings would be much more illuminating.) So if you have one of these, tell us - do you like it? If you do, have you had it for long, washed it many times? We've found that the petals that are supposed to hold snacks in quickly lose a bit of their shape, and that it then leaks crumbs and even small snack items like nobody's business. How about you?

Several of you haven't forgotten about the Green Toys Tea Set, either, which is one of our favorite recycled plastic toys. If you have a cute photo of your child playing with yours, send it to us and we'll publish it (and link to your blog, if you have one). We'd love to hear what you and your child think of it, but we're pretty sure you love it too, right down to the packaging.

The Most Expensive Stuff You Bought

Three of you bought Avent Steam Sterilizers, which was an interesting outlier - no one bought any other bottle sterilizer by any other brand through ZRecs during that time. What's up with that? Is it because it's well-discounted, or was there some other motivating factor?

Ninety-four of you (!) bought 30-minute Flip digital video camcorders when they were on sale for $50-$60. Either that, or some of you bought more than one. Given the absurdly low sale price you paid for it, how do you like it?

Several of you bought Hamilton Beach food processors after we identified their BPA status; this food processor was the most popular, and is frequently on sale for around 25% off. We had never (and still have never) used Hamilton Beach products, so we'd really like to know: If you bought this, how has it performed?

ZRecs visitors also dropped some Benjamins on a Beaba Babycook, which we are currently testing for review; a few BabyBjorn Travel Cribs, which we loved but balked at the price of; and several Britax car seats - a Roundabout and two Boulevards. (Compare this with 18 Britax seat sales we tracked during their last semi-annual sale, and a bunch of Frontiers that sold after our in-depth comparison between it and its competition.) Any thoughts on these, users of very nice expensive products?

Interesting Baby Gear, Toys, Books, and Music You Bought

We'll skip the random items you added to your shopping carts to get free shipping or the really nice things that are totally non-kid-related that you clearly purchased through ZRecs to help give us a boost (thanks for that, by the way) and focus on a few on-topic purchases that caught our eye.

A couple of you picked up KidCo Adhesive Mount Magnet Locks, just the kind of product that usually makes our eyes glaze over. But these are a really great idea, a step above the kinds of cabinet locks we used with Z. A few reviews on Amazon seemed frustratingly surprised by the lack of keys in the set (yes, you have to buy the keys and locks separately) but I suspect the reason for this is that you just keep a couple of the keys around and use them for all the locks, which means you'd want to buy the locks separately. So if you bought or have used these, we really want to know: Do these work as well as you'd hoped?

Plan Toys has a really cute toddler pounding toy (they call it the Punch and Drop), with balls you knock into a box, and a couple of you purchased it, although we had never mentioned it.

We love almost every Plan Toy product we've handled (with one disappointing exception). The natural dyes they use, the way they sand stuff down, and the way they incorporate any other materials needed to enhance a product - in the case of this wooden toy, it looks like they have plastic or rubber seals that give the balls a resting place and provide some friction for pounding - is really top-notch. This design in particular makes a lot more sense than the wood-on-wood pounding of standard tool-bench style pounders - it's just so hard to get the wooden pegs and holes to match up at just the point of friction, and then they swell or shrink in different climates. We like the look of this toy almost as much as we like Plan Toys' Hammer Balls set, which is truly the standard-setter for this type of toy as far a we're concerned.

Someone also bought Plan Toys' Shape and Sort It Out set, which looks like a really nice version of a cheap Melissa & Doug version of the toy we had when Z was an infant and toddler.

A few of you are still buying Fred Party People Chopsticks, which we found to be one of the better inexpensive options for chopsticks for children in our Toddler Chopstick Showdown - a six-pack costs about $10. And a few of you have been picking up rattles from Sassy's cute, relatively new Earth Brights line, like this one. We like the way they're combining brightly-colored fabrics and wood in some of these infant toy designs.

You picked up some interesting books for your own perusal, including Home Comforts (our own family's favorite go-to guide for "the art and science of keeping house"), the intriguing The Complete Organic Pregnancy, The Top 100 Baby Purees, a nice alternative to the standard baby food cookbook, and A Child's Garden, a book offering "60 ideas to make any garden come alive for children." Somebody got a great-looking Eric Carle growth chart.

As for kids' books, we love poring over our sales summaries because our readers help us find great kids' books all the time. First, though, a couple we recommended seemed to go over well: Several of you bought Margaret Wise Brown and Leonard Weisgard's seminal The Important Book or Wendy Pfeffer and Robin Brickman's astonishing, beautiful A Log's Life - the former after we mentioned it as one of our Ten Favorite Kids' Books (you should check out the rest!), and the latter likely because we wrote that "there really isn't a more beautiful introduction to life cycles, food webs, and ecological niches than this lovely book." If you did buy either of these, tell us: Do you and your children love it as much as we do?

Several of you jumped at the chance to buy books in Jessica Spanyol's Minibugs series after we reviewed one earlier this week, or one of you bought every single one. Are they what you expected, based on our review?

Speaking of seminal, if there is any child who does not need ready access to The Monster At the End of This Book, which several of you bought in the past couple months, it is really the single most important Sesame Street book you could buy for $5. Michael Smollin's illustrations are fabulous and the story is a crack-up for anyone who has ever been afraid of anything, or wished that a character inside a book would try to destroy it.

Books you bought that we hadn't known about include the Skippyjon Jones books, which we are pretty sure Z is going to flip out over, and Arnold Lobel's Mouse Tales on CD. Lobel is a great reader of his own stories (we own his Frog and Toad stories on CD) and it was cool to discover this one too, which we'll probably spring for if it isn't at our local library. You also bought What's Alive?, one of so many well-conceived and surprising books in the Let's-Read-And-Find-Out Science series that we must, must, must get our own hands on. Seriously, we should own stock in this publisher.

ZRecs readers are big, big fans of Putumayo Kids CDs. The music series is good enough that if you have heard any, you are probably a fan too.

If You Bought It: What Did You Think Of It?

One of the best things about the community of readers that has developed around Z Recommends is their interest in sharing the pros and cons of kids' stuff they've tried. So if you own any of the products above, tell us what you think of them! We'll collect some of the most interesting feedback we get and highlight it in a later post, or even quote you in the ZRecs Guide listing for the product, where we're working on adding opinions on the products we cover from several additional sources. So browse the post above and take a moment to give us your two cents on products your fellow readers are probably thinking about buying right now! (If you're reading this post in your email or an RSS reader, click here to visit the post and comment.)

Like what you read on Z Recommends? You can have posts delivered for free every day via RSS or email, as well as occasional summaries of our links to other blogs, news articles, and websites from our Delicious feed (our alternative to published link roundups). If you're already a subscriber, please click through to this post if you like it, to let us know you'd like to see more content like this.

We've always loved the look of P'kolino's line of children's furniture, but never their prices. Their Book Buggee, a cute toy and book wagon for toddlers, is on sale on Amazon for almost 40% off the standard retail - selling on Amazon for $24.14, down from the $38.50 P'kolino charges when they sell direct. (Don't be fooled by the "$44.90" list price on Amazon.) So we're looking again, and thinking about how cute it is, and trying to overlook the fact that it's made of fiberboard with a wood veneer. And then we notice that this thing is about the size of a piece of paper, with a 7.5" x 13.5" bellyprint, and standing 7.5" tall. Is that small?

It has been a while since we had a two-year-old, and Z has always been big. So I ask you - have any of you purchased this cute thing, and can you tell us if it is a reasonable size for a one-year-old, two-year-old, three-year-old child?

If your child has a different toy cart, do me a favor - grab a standard piece of paper and tell me if theirs is bigger or smaller than said paper, and if you think it's a good size for your child.

As for the deal, though, it's a hard one to beat. $24.14 means you can throw a book in there and get free shipping. And we all know how cheap great kids' books can be. (Need some suggestions? Browse the comments of our ongoing LeapFrog Tag giveaway - we've had several dozen great suggestions so far, and have them all linked up to Amazon.)


P'kolino's gorgeous (and cleverly compact) Klick Desk is also on sale: ~$142 if you like the orange, or ~$148 if you'd rather red. The handsome green option is still selling at full list price, $198.50.

The Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushner collaboration Brundibar may be the kind of book you only allow into your life if you don't know what you're getting into, as happened with me. If that's the case, I apologize, because this is a book you should be unafraid to share with your children, and I will try to explain both why this may not seem to be the case and why it is true.

Brundibar is a story of bullying set in a context of poverty, illness, and death. Its protagonists, Pepicek and Aninku, are on a mission to get milk from the market to feed to their bedridden mother, on orders from her doctor. They have no money, so they decide to follow the lead of an organ-grinder, Brundibar, and sing for money. They can't be heard over Brundibar's hurdy-gurdy, get frustrated and harass him (in the form of bears) and are expelled from the town square. In a dark alley, after a nap underneath some Hebrew newspapers, stray animals help connect them with 300 schoolchildren, who march back to the square and perform as a full chorus, singing a melancholic song about how sad parents are when their children grow up. The townspeople fill the children's milk bucket with gold coins, the children are able to buy milk, and their mother recovers.



Tony Kushner (best known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the stage cycle Angels In America) wrote the book's text and Sendak's illustrations lend new depth to his preference for drawing young children in outsized coats and shoes. In our house, the most notable feature of the book is its unflinching portrayal of Brundibar as a person who detests children; such cultural referents are few and far between in picture books. That and the book's other darker elements - the mother's mortal peril, the harsh reality of a world of adults who will not part with their money simply to save a life, and the idea of young children banding together to ultimately run an evil man out of town - are what draw our four-year-old daughter Z to it, as to certain relatively safe tales from the Brothers Grimm, and keep it near the top of our reading list.

Heavy. But that's just the start.

There is a richness of German, Czech, and Hebrew references throughout the book that make it clear there is more going on here. Brundibar seems to combine physical characteristics of Mussolini, Napoleon, and Hitler; he is clearly an imperialist, and a stand-in for a slovenly military dictator. And there is something distressing as well as heartbreaking about the "growing-up" song that is the central musical passage of the book. The surface subject is that children age quickly and leave the nest, with their mothers crying after them; a center spread in the book following the song's lyrics shows a dozen-odd children rising on the backs of ravens while mothers clutch their remaining babies and weep into handkerchiefs. The image bothered me because the children were still - well, children, and there was something about that sea of crows that felt like... a cloud. Smoke. Soot.

An inscription on one of the city's background walls that tipped me off: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. I looked it up. The phrase, I learned, was inscribed over the entrances to many of the Nazi concentration camps. That is when, finally, I looked up "Brundibar."

Brundibar's origins are as an opera, written in 1938 by Jewish Czech composer Hans Krasa and librettist Adolf Hoffmeister in Prague. In 1941 they cast the children of a Prague orphanage for a production of the opera, but by the time it was first performed in 1942, Krasa and Hoffmeister had both been transported to Theresienstadt, or Terezin, a concentration camp in then-Czechoslovakia. By 1943, almost all of the children from that orphanage had been transferred to Thereseinstadt as well, with only Hoffmeister escaping Prague in time. Reunited, Krasa reconvened his production and reconstructed the opera from memory and a partial piano score, and the opera was performed 55 times in the concentration camp. Most of the production's participants, including Krasa, were later exterminated at Auschwitz.



It is difficult to describe the feeling of reading this book to our daughter Z the first time after I had learned all of this. I can say that it is not a kind of feeling you have very often.

The meaning of this book will evolve, for Z, over time. I am ready to tell her about its history when she is, but that will be a long time from now. For now, it is a book about bullies, and about how the weak (in this case, children) can overcome even the most frightening malevolence. In short, it is a fantasy that I hope with all my heart children like mine can make into a reality.

Brundibar himself has the last word in this book, even after being chased off by snapping dogs and whooping children. Scrawled on an invitation to a special performance of his own play presented to the Red Cross during their tour of the concentration camp, Brundibar offers an epilogue that makes me confident that reading such books to children is ground we must tread - carefully, but purposefully and unflinchingly.

They believe they've won the fight,
They believe I'm gone - not quite!
Nothing ever works out neatly -
Bullies don't give up completely.
One departs, the next appears,
and we shall meet again, my dears!
Though I go, I won't go far...
I'll be back. LOVE, Brundibar

Do you or your child have a favorite children's book about standing up to bullying, or about making the world a better place in general?

Thumbnail image from Terezin concentration camp by Colm Rice.

I came into parenting pretty sick of Where the Wild Things Are - overexposed, I guess. It was so heavily pushed in doll, decor, and Reading-Is-Fun-poster form in my childhood that after passing through that golden stage I couldn't really read, look at, or hear it without seeing the gold-seal-embossed symbol it had become for the 1960s and the wild and woolly childhood it invoked.

But I had never read In the Night Kitchen, and when I checked it out from the library during Z's second year, more out of a sense of obligation than anything else, I was amazed by what I found. It was poetry. I was allowed to read real poetry to my child, which she would listen to, and (at least partially) understand. I noticed that the rhythm of the language was what she was after then, plus the images, that the story came last of all. And I noticed that In the Night Kitchen was written in precisely that way, with an oddly fluctuating meter that poses more challenges to the adult reader than a toddler listener.

My four-year-old daughter Z and I have many favorite children's authors, and even more favorite children's illustrators, and when it comes to children's books, it's very difficult to state which is the more important feature of a good book. I didn't always see children's books that way, but reading to children is a process of both discovery and rediscovery - we find new life in favorites from our own childhood through our children's rapt, engaged attention to books new and old. And no author helped shape my growing awareness of the relationship between a child, a book, and its read-alouder than the works of Maurice Sendak.

Z and I memorized In the Night Kitchen. She could recite it as I read it. I could read it to her with the book facing her, turning the pages as I recited. It became one of my favorite books, as well as one of hers. And the love of particular books is one of the first things we have found that we can truly share on equal footing. I can't love Polly Pockets the way she does. I can't even love ice cream in quite the same way as she does, although I do love it. Certainly, the love we have for our other family members - her mother, my wife - is very different. But a book like that is something that we can both love in pretty much the same way. And that's a special kind of connection.

With that we turned to Where the Wild Things Are, and I discovered it as though reading it for the first time. Despite Max's celebrated orneriness, the book is far less a meditation on how independent, cranky, or downright wild children can be - there are much better books for that - as a fantasy about what it means to be trapped in your own bad feelings, with no one to understand them and no real desire to be understood so much as OBEYED. It is, in short, a fantasy about the control children see embodied in their parents, which, from their narrow perspective as the oppressed party, is as fickle, self-absorbed, and steely as the role Max plays in the place where the wild things are.

We memorized Where the Wild Things Are too, cover to cover, and I can jump in at any point ("and tamed them with the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes at once..." See? Scary). I fell in love with its language and the unique way it described childhood frustration and desire. "We'll eat you up, we love you so" - both parents and their children can relate to the sentiments of the Wild Things as much as to Max, in the love and tension they feel between their roles.

We're seeing this with Z especially these days; it's almost as though a hidden switch was flipped when she turned four, and she's now frequently yelling - literally yelling - at us about how FRUSTRATED WE ARE MAKING HER because we won't bend to whim X, Y, or, in most cases, simply Z. These exchanges usually end with her telling us she is NEVER COMING BACK to the room we are in; sometimes pouting ensues that requires some diplomacy, but generally she is back 30 seconds later, a new girl. Like Max, she has learned nothing in the encounter; she has just released the tension that had built up inside of her, and we, like Max's mother, may tut-tut or parry with consequences, but in the end, she's our kid, and we still have to feed her supper.

Soon, unless Warner Brothers kills it, we'll have a Spike Jonze film version of the book to ponder, although I'm suspicious it will be years before Z is ready for it. I used to worry about whether such adaptations would somehow commit cultural patricide, but either I don't get out enough anymore to worry about that or the book is just too good to need protecting. I do find it amusing that one of the reported problems with the film is that Max comes off as unlikeable. I don't really think Sendak wrote any likeability into Max, except what we infer from our general appreciation for children. Max's only redemption is that he actually misses his home, rather than being dragged back to reality against his will.

For today's entry in our Where the Wild Things Are giveaway and the chance to win a copy of the animated DVD featuring that story plus In the Night Kitchen and the Nutshell Library stories, tell us about your little wild thing. What have they done lately that made you think they should own a wolf suit?