Tag Archives: Children’s literature

Dave Eggers’ The Wild Things

The Wild Things is Dave Eggers’ foray into the universe of Maurice Sendak, a novelization based on Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Eggers’ own collaboration with Spike Jonze on the screenplay for the film of the same title. … Continue reading

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Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are

First things first. The movie version of Where The Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze from a script by Jonze and “staggering genius” Dave Eggers and soundtracked by hipster goddess Karen O, is not an exact, faithful translation of … Continue reading

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Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are

It happens every so often that I find myself asked to write a “review” of something that is so deeply imbedded in our culture and such an integral part of our collective experience that my first impulse is to run … Continue reading

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Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish 

Robert Wiersema penned this review. Anyone who has spent any time with a child, or with a children’s book, will realize that a child’s sense of humour, and of reality, tends toward the gloriously demented. In the open, amorphous, formative state … Continue reading

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China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun

China Miéville (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, The Iron Council) is renowned for the world he has created around the great, multi-species, many-storied city of New Crobuzon. Those are adult works, beyond a doubt: ferocious and frightening, full of the … Continue reading

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John Masefield’s The Box of Delights: or When the Wolves Were Running

Kay Harker is on his way home from boarding school for the Christmas holidays when he finds himself being followed by two suspicious characters. When he arrives home he finds that not only will he be sharing his holidays with … Continue reading

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Mark I. West’s  A Children’s Literature Tour of Great Britain

At seventeen, I had one of the thrills of my young life when during a tour of England with my church choir, our anxious chaperones finally let us loose in Oxford for a day. After happily getting lost in the … Continue reading

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Josepha Sherman and T.K.F. Weisskopf’s Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts: The Subversive Folklore of Childhood

Pamela Murray Winters contributed this review which ran first on Mostly Folk. It’s been 10 years since I bonded with my new office mate over the issue of a children’s song. It must have been a slow day in the … Continue reading

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Teya Rosenberg and associated editors’ Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom

That fiction has power to alter reality is, at least in one sense, literally true. Fiction is a product of language, and human beings live largely in a social and linguistic world — above all, a world of narrative. It … Continue reading

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Johnny Cunningham and others’ peter & wendy

A rich montage of songs and sounds combine to bring the listener to the world of Neverland to retell the story of Peter Pan and Wendy. This music was used in a theatrical production of Peter Pan, using puppetry, light, … Continue reading

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