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Our Grade:

Title: In the Night Kitchen
Author: Maurice Sendak
Publication Info: Red Fox; New Ed edition July 5, 2001, ISBN: 0099417472
Genre: Top 100 Banned Books

Submitted by Naomi Libicki

Recently, my husband and I bought a giant pile of used children’s books for our one-year-old son – the books we remembered most fondly from our childhoods. One of the books I picked out was In the Night Kitchen.

When our copy arrived, I found the following stamp inside the front cover: Windham Public Library: WITHDRAWN.

“What huh?” I thought. And then, “Oh yeah . . . the penis.”

In the Night Kitchen opens and closes with its protagonist in bed, wearing his pajamas. At part of the transition from this mundane scene to the surreal world where the main action of the book takes place, Mickey falls out of his clothes. He later acquires a sort of flight suit made of cake batter, but for much of the action, he is naked. And rather than using concealing props and postures, Maurice Sendak simply draws him, little-boy penis and all.

The otherworld that Mickey journeys to when he is awoken by bumps in the night is the Night Kitchen, a city with jam jars and coffee canisters for buildings. He is menaced by three fat, good-humored giants in chef’s outfits, who mix him into a cake batter and put him in the oven. However, he escapes, and builds an airplane out of bread dough to harvest milk from the Milky Way. Once this ingredient is obtained, the bakers complete their cake, and Mickey returns to bed.

You know how sometimes you go back and read or watch something you loved as a child, and spend the entire time cringing? And then there are times when you go back, and it’s just . . . perfect.

This is one of those. The city of the Night Kitchen is charming – it’s even got elevated trains made out of bread loaves. The character designs are also spot-on; Mickey is wonderfully expressive, and the jolly, be-mustachio’ed appearance of the bakers – they look a little like the Mario Brothers actually – helps tip the tone of the book from scary to surreal. There are also bits of rhyme that have stayed with you for as long as I can remember. Mickey’s milk harvesting song, for instance : “I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me. God bless milk and God bless me!” Or the chant of the bakers as they mix up the cake batter: “Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter! We bake cake! And nothing’s the matter!”

At this point I should really list some negatives, but I can’t think of any. Well, maybe one. Maurice Sendak is Jewish, and Mickey seems to some extent to share his creator’s cultural background: He calls his parents Mama and Papa, the bakers use kosher salt decades before Alton Brown’s Good Eats, and there’s no lard or other non-kosher ingredients to be found in the Night Kitchen. So why is Mickey uncircumcised?

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Categories: 2007 Banned Book Week Reviews

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