In the Night Kitchen as Wild as Sendak's More Celebrated Ventures

A couple years ago, I took a college class aimed at preparing future educators to create lesson plans revolving around certain texts representative of children’s literature. Although I have no plans to teach, I took the class out of a deep love of and interest in juvenile literature. Although we started the class with the universally familiar The Tale of Peter Rabbit, we soon moved on to more unfamiliar territory. Though most of us in the class had read and enjoyed Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are as youngsters, few of us had even heard of In the Night Kitchen. Some of us were in for a bit of a shock.

It’s hard to imagine such a simple children’s book causing such alarm, but not everyone approved of the depictions that earned this slim volume the distinction of Caldecott Honor. This is probably part of the reason that it is not as widely known as Wild Things. It’s a graphically driven book, with large pictures filling the pages and only a few oversized, carefully lettered words driving along the narration. Everything seems larger than life, which is appropriate given the fact that the bulk of the book is a dreamscape. Young Mickey is tiny compared to his surroundings, yet he twists his size to his advantage. The world he has landed in is a distortion of the world he experiences daily; the airplane hanging over his head as he drifts to sleep and the fact that he hears a noise below him, where the kitchen would be, are indicators of what sorts of images this dream will hold.

The three bakers whom Mickey meets are large and pudgy, fairly unthreatening and indistinct from one another. They are jovial characters except when they fear they will have no milk to complete their cake. After reading through the book a couple times, I noticed that their eyes remain closed until Mickey makes his presence known, indicating visually that they have been oblivious to his presence up to this point. They seem to represent authority, but in Mickey’s dream they hold no sway over him. The book taps into a child’s disdain for societal conventions. The simplest and most controversial manifestation of this comes when Mickey falls out of his clothes. He appears startled and disturbed when still in his pajamas, but when he is free of his clothing he seems to be quite content. Later, he strikes a compromise, accepting the societal convention of clothes but fashioning them for himself out of batter. He further expresses his individuality by insisting that he get milk for the bakers “the Mickey way.”

Both Wild Things and Night Kitchen involve a young child finding a niche for himself in a strange and fantastical setting. This tale further purports to serve the purpose of an explanatory folk tale – in chronicling Mickey’s journey, it tells us why we have cake every morning. Of course, most of us don’t have cake every morning, but this further goes along with the idea of the child being in charge here. If Mickey had his way, we would have cake every morning. Hey, sounds good to me.

It took me a few readings of this book to decide I liked it. The illustrations really require more reading than the words and reveal possible deeper meanings in the story. The illustrations, though rather dark and flat in color, are intriguing; especially enjoyable is the cityscape consisting of food containers. I wouldn’t let a little nudity get in the way of enjoying this book. It may not be as immediately embraceable as Wild Things, but it’s worth taking the extra time to settle into an appreciation of it.