However, on a personal level, I find reading In the Night Kitchen out loud a strangely jarring experience.
I’m a guy who loves Vonnegut and Terry Gilliam movies – I like weird. I like that it’s not a sentimental, sing-song nursery rhyme. I like that everything about In the Night Kitchen is atypical. It’s not fair for me to fault him for my inability to hone in on the perfect inflection for his story. And I realize that it’s my problem, not Sendak’s. The words are presented more like verse than a normal narrative – and maybe that’s coloring my reading of it – but all of my attempts to find its poetic cadence have failed miserably. For whatever reason, when reading Night Kitchen at bed-time, I find myself tripping over the words constantly. My issue with In the Night Kitchen is a rhythm thing. (It’s an awesome museum.) If you ask her to tell you what the story of In the Night Kitchen is, she can’t really verbalize it, but she knows, without a doubt, that she likes it. She thinks it’s funny and strange, she loves pouring over the little details in the backgrounds of the Night Kitchen, and she has fond memories of visiting Philadelphia’s Please Touch Kids’ Museum where she played on huge reproductions of scenes from Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are. Don’t get me wrong – my daughter LOVES it.
What a goofball.”īut, all nakedness aside, I do find In the Night Kitchen to be a fairly difficult book to read. When she does notice it now, she just smiles and says, “He lost his clothes. When we first read the book, my daughter snorted and giggled at seeing Mickey naked for the first time, but, every subsequent time we’ve read it, his nudity has almost never come up. I’d wager ten bucks that any parent who ever tried to have In the Night Kitchen removed from their local library laughed like crazy whenever their two-year-old did a pre-bath naked run through their house, particularly if it was in front of company, so it’s ridiculous to try to turn Mickey’s nakedness into anything perverse or predatory. Mickey isn’t sexualized AT ALL and, let’s be honest, most kids, thanks to diaper changes or older or younger siblings, have seen a baby or toddler naked before. That choice alone has caused the book to be challenged or banned on several occasions and, while, sure, it is unusual to see a naked child in a picture book, it’s a fairly lame cause for controversy. I first became aware of it thanks to its reputation as “the book with the naked kid” – the young hero, three-year-old Mickey, loses his clothes early in the story, and he spends a fair amount of the rest of the tale naked, with his penis frequently visible.
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