Chapter Forty-Eight: The Wild Things

This book by Dave Eggers, an expansion of Maurice Sendak's classic picture book "Where the Wild Things Are" is very strange.  The edition I had happened to be covered in faux fur with a slit cut around painted human eyes...   The content of this book might be stranger than its furry cover, although in fairness the content of the storybook is pretty bizarre, too.  Eggers stays fairly faithful to his model, although of course in expanding a very short picture book into a full-length novel, he added a lot of details that were only hinted at in the storybook or that were not there at all.  Most of these details fit with my ideas about and impressions of Sendak's story, although I was rather disappointed in the ending of The Wild Things.  Without giving it away, all I'll say is that, while it remains fairly faithful to the original in terms of plot, I thought the feeling of the novel's ending was vastly different from the feeling of the storybook's ending, and I know which one I prefer.  Still, if you like "Where the Wild Things Are," it's definitely worth your while to read The Wild Things, if for nothing else than to compare the two and get a fresh perspective on what is considered a childhood classic (whatever that even means).