Outside Over There

As a customer recently pointed out to me, in his lovely new book on Maurice Sendak, There's a Mystery There, Jonathan Cott makes the case that Sendak's 1981 picture book, Outside Over There, is one of his great masterpieces and the central book to understanding his life and art. And I hardly knew it! Do you? It's the Grimm-like story of Ida, who rescues her baby sister from goblin kidnappers (who turn out to be babies too), and it has the adventure and tamed menace of Where the Wild Things Are as well as the naked weirdness of In the Night Kitchen. I look forward to getting to know its depths over time, as I have with those other great and strange tales of his. (3 and up)