Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation
by Gregory Maguire
Booklist (September 15, 2009)
Maguire begins his affectionate appreciation of America’s (the world’s?) greatest picture-book artist by recalling the ferrous tang of terror he tasted on first talking to the man he calls the original wild thing. The experience seems to have concentrated his mind wonderfully, for his insights into Sendak’s work are erudite and imaginative. Maguire’s appreciation is rooted in his subject’s own appreciation of such artists as Randolph Caldecott, William Blake, Phillip Otto Runge, Winsor McCay, and a host of others. Happily, Maguire, in the best picture-book tradition, doesn’t only tell, he shows, offering a generous selection of Sendak’s own work and often coupling it with the work of those others who have been his inspiration. But there is more: Maguire also offers sober and well-informed thoughts on theme and technique, a quirky list of his personal top-10 images from the oeuvre, and a tour de force retrospective of Sendakian leit motifs set to the music of the text from his masterpiece Where the Wild Things Are. Early on, Maguire acknowledges that he regards his subject as a genius. Surely he will get no argument from readers of this beautifully conceived, gracefully written, and lovingly considered tribute. – Cart, Michael
