We Have Always Lived in the Castle

 

I put off reading Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle for a long time because I built it up so much, & the anticipation was fun. The longer I waited, the more I was sure it was going to be an amazing book. The building up was totally unprovoked. No one had told me it was a great book; in fact, a friend who posted it on Goodreads gave it just three stars. The buildup came from the fact that it's one of the best titles I've ever heard, I enjoyed Jackson's story "The Lottery" however many years ago I read it, & after receiving a copy of the freaking gorgeous Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition (pictured directly below), I was even more convinced it had to be great. Yeah, I totally judge books by their covers. 

 

I've posted three covers, by the way, because this book has a beautiful cover history all around. Not many old books (Castle was first published in 1962 and was Jackson's last book) can say that. So anyway, I finally read it. This book is everything I love: It's off-putting, it's unnerving, it's dark, it's weird, it's somehow charming. It's a horror story without being overtly scary. The horror is in the characters Jackson portrays. The book's narrator is 18-year-old Mary Katherine Blackwood, or Merricat, who lives with her sister Constance & Uncle Julian in a large house, empty of the rest of their family who were poisoned with arsenic years before. Constance hasn't left the house since then, Merricat braves the leery townspeople to keep the house stocked with supplies, & doddering Julian writes & rewrites notes about the family's last days.    

It's hard to imagine two scarier characters in literature than Merricat & Constance, & much of this is due to the fact that they seem so innocent. Their quiet, mundane life in isolation isn't peaceful, just ominous, as Merricat is constantly alluding to the upcoming "last day." Merricat is 18 & Constance is 28, but they both feel much younger, 13 or 14, like they've been in arrested development since their parents died. Merricat is one of the most brilliantly written protagonists I've ever encountered. She's superstitious and believes in magic, though this reads almost as more of a severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, since she ritualizes everything. Her thoughts are sometimes frantic, she slips into near-hallucinations, and she gives off a constant aura of danger. Being stuck in her head for the duration of the book is a scary place to be. Yet in her head, her madness is justifiable - inviting almost. Constance mothers her. They adore each other, & their happy home life is disturbed by the entrance of Cousin Charles, who's got his eye on the family's money.

While the underlying question for much of the book is, of course, "Who poisoned the family?", when we finally find out, it's almost secondarily of interest, because so much more has been put on the line. How is Merricat going to get rid of Charles, whom she distrusts & hates? Whose side is Constance, who's smitten with Charles, going to choose? How long can Uncle Julian stick around in poor health? How will Merricat react to the major upheaval that's coming? Are the townspeople, who love to persecute the Blackwoods, going to do something drastic? The whole book is a question of "us versus them," but which side is the safe one? Are these girls ever going to live a happy, normal life again? Do we even want them to? Do they deserve it?

This book is absolutely unforgettable - the ending is chilling - & worth a million rereads. Merricat's almost fevered thoughts read like dark poetry. I'll leave you with one of my favorite sentences, & hope that you'll be intrigued enough to pick it up yourself. Oh & one last thing: If you do get the Penguin edition, don't read the introduction until after you read the book! It's excellent, but it gives away everything!

Like children hunting for shells, or two old ladies going through dead leaves looking for pennies, we shuffled along the kitchen floor with our feet, turning over broken trash to find things which were still whole, and useful.

Click these!

I'll be back later to talk about Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but for now I just want to share these two links. They're must-reads for you children's lit fans.

The first is an article from the New York Times by Maria Tatar, "No More Adventures in Wonderland." I enjoyed this article so much because her thesis is something I've never considered: that the darkness in today's children's literature is more sinister than children's lit of say, 100 years ago, because there's no silliness to balance them out, & that this is perhaps because the authors are speaking to their own adult thoughts & feelings rather than speaking to their child audience. In many ways, Barrie's Peter and Wendy (Happy 100th! I love you more & more with each reread) & Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (I love you, too) are so tragic, to me, so it's interesting to think of them as having elements that assuage grief, whereas something like The Hunger Games does not. Thoughts on this?

The second is a New Yorker article, "Broken Kingdom: Fifty Years of the Phantom Tollbooth." The Phantom Tollbooth, written by Norton Juster & illustrated by Jules Feiffer, is one of the only books I don't think I could ever look at through a critical lense. I can remember exactly when I fell in love with the book, & that same kind of unabashed, innocent love is what I still feel every time I read it. I feel like a child again, & have no desire to make it mean anything more or less than that. Actually, to be honest, I fell in love with the movie first. My parents taped the movie when it came on Sci-Fi, & my brother & I probably watched it a million times before I even knew there was a book. The movie is wonderful! & that's saying a lot, considering how great the book is.

But I digress. This article is pretty great, as both an interview & a critical piece.

Feiffer and Juster, both born in 1929, are like a pair of wryly benevolent uncles, with Norton the dreamy, crinkle-eyed, soft-spoken uncle who gives you the one piece of good advice you never forget, and Jules the wisecracking uncle who never lets up on your foibles but was happy to have you crash on his couch that night you just couldn’t bear going home.

Isn't that exactly how you'd imagine them?! The interview portion of the article makes me feel sheer delight about the book all over again. Did you know Juster had synesthesia? Or that Feiffer & Juster lived in the same apartment building during the writing of the book?

The book was published in 1961, and no one had much hope that it would find an audience. “Everyone said this is not a children’s book, the vocabulary is much too difficult, the wordplay and the punning they will never understand, and anyway fantasy is bad for children because it disorients them,” Juster said, four million copies later. “I thought, O.K., it will come out, and end on the remainder table.”

I love that. I have so much respect for any author who respects kids & doesn't talk down to them. & fifty years in, it's a classic. Take that, close-minded grown-ups!

The only part of this article I find problematic - & I might be alone here - is the author's assertion that the book's stance on education makes it such a magical classic & that the "point" of the book is "that normal school subjects can be wonderful if you don’t have to experience them as normal schooling." This is such an adult viewpoint. It is true - but it is true for the adult who is handing the book to a child, not the child himself. Did anyone fall in love with The Phantom Tollbooth because they realized school could be a wondrous thing? I'm going to guess no, because I sure didn't. I feel it's that magical combination of adventure story, a marvelous cast of characters, & neverending wordplay (much like Wonderland, eh?) that makes the book so great. I learned a lot reading Tollbooth - what the words din & doldrums mean, for instance - but the celebration of a liberal arts education is such an adult reflection of the book. To a child, the story is funny, scary, magical, rollicking, cute & cuddly & at the same time monstrous (Did anyone else never know whether to think the Lethargarians were adorable or frightening?).

It's like saying the Alice books are classics because they taught Alice to question authority. Sure, the books accomplished that, but that's not why they endure. They endure because of the children who read & reread the stories hoping that Alice will be able to stay in Wonderland forever, that Milo & Tock can stay in the Lands Beyond forever, just screwing with the sunrise & hanging out with talking animals & jumping to Conclusions. No young reader of these books is happy that Alice & Milo get to go home & go to school. Or are they?

I'm going to launch into a full-blown rant if I keep going. So yeah! Read these articles! & share your thoughts if you feel so inclined.

& despite the fact that I said I have no desire to look at The Phantom Tollbooth critically, I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth, annotated by Leonard Marcus. So exciting.

I'm such a slacker./Have you met the Moomins?

I haven't updated in a month! I am terrible! I have, though, been a busy reader since then. What have I read since Wonderstruck, you may or may not be wondering?

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, The Sea of Monsters & The Titan's Curse (Percy Jackson 2 & 3) by Rick Riordan, Cosmic by Frank C. Boyce, If I Stay by Gayle Forman, & The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.

Over the next week I promise a steady string of reviews of each of those books! I only disliked one of them - & boy did I intensely dislike it. Can you guess which?

I also read the book I'm going to turn my attention to today: Moominsummer Madness by Tove Jansson.

I first met the Moomins three or four years ago when a friend who knew my love for children's lit insisted I seek out Jansson's series. She described it as something like "trippy Nordic children's books from the '40s." I immediately ordered an old, battered paperback from Amazon of The Finn Family Moomintroll, caught a glimpse of the hippo-like Moomin family, & fell instantly in love.

Recently Macmillan's Square Fish imprint released gorgeous repackages of the series. Here's a few of them. Lovely, right?

How to explain the experience of reading a Moomin book? Tove Jansson's creative genius is impossible to put into words. You can't read one without marveling at how deep her imagination well is. (...What did I just say?) The first inclination is almost to feel that something was lost in translation from the Swedish, because it's just so weird, like peeking into a child's fever dream. But then you realize that Jansson is just that awesome, & it's just that rare to come across a person whose work (both books & art) feels so original, so unpretentiously set apart from the mainstream. A comparable children's book personality might be Nancy Willard, who I was lucky enough to experience as our writer in residence one summer at Hollins. Both women live in these beautiful worlds of their own creation, & both weren't afraid to challenge their child audiences with big ideas about life.

So anyway, summer was coming to a close, so I thought it the perfect time to read Moominsummer Madness. The Moomin books always open with a cast of characters. In this case, the Moomin family: Moominmamma, Moominpappa, Moomintroll, & their friends: the Snork Maiden, Snufkin, Sniff, the Groke, the Muskrat, Thingumy & Bob, the Hemulen, Too-ticky, & Little My. Those names! Intrigued enough to read it yet?

In this summertime adventure, the Moomin family home is flooded after a volcano erupts. Never ones to be daunted by natural or unnatural disasters, the Moomins & friends take to the roof until a new house floats by - a new house that just happens to be a theater, where they promptly decide to put on a play. The Moomins are an impressive bunch. They sometimes get discouraged, but they take everything in stride. Everything is met with optimism & the ingenuity to solve any problem. They don't get stressed. Well, sometimes the Snork Maiden is a little melodramatic, & Little My is always melodramatic, but the family as a whole is blissfully laid-back.

"Moomintroll was lying in his customary place (or one of his places), curled up on the green-and-yellow moss with his tail carefully tucked in under him. He looked gravely and contentedly down into the water while he listened to the rustle of wings and the drowsy buzz of bees around him."

They are a bunch of characters taken to contemplation, resourcefulness, & filled with a real love for each other. Even in melancholy scenes, when characters are sad, lost, lonely, despondent, you get the sense that there's a kind of joy bubbling up under it all, that everyone knows that just around the corner they'll be happy & content again. Life give you lemons? Put on a play! I don't know about you, but that's a lesson I need to hear pretty much every day of my life.

The book - & this is true for the whole series - should be read for its illustrations as much as the story itself. I wish I could share them all with you here. I can't say this about many books, but I cannot imagine a person who wouldn't love the Moomins. Sure, they're a little unconventional, but for a series that began about 70 years ago(!) their appeal is everlasting & universal. I'd even go so far as to assert that I cannot imagine a person reading Moominsummer Madness & not immediately picking up the rest of the series. They're that loveable - absurd & wacky & sometimes a little naive, but absolutely loveable. Pure magic. Pick it up.

& in another month it'll be time to read Moominvalley in November! I'll be back next time - & this will be SOON - with We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.

Wonderstruck - & a giveaway!

Wonderstruck, Brian Selznick, Scholastic, September 2011.

Well, Brian Selznick has done it again. When I read The Invention of Hugo Cabret, I was blindsided by its originality, inventiveness, & the feeling that I was taking in a new type of art. With Wonderstruck, he utilizes this same art form - a complex story told through words & pictures - with equally magical results.

I can't even verbalize how excited I was to read this book. This May, the first morning of my first BEA, I arrived at the children's author breakfast to find a Wonderstruck tote bag in my seat. Sweet! New tote! Then I opened the tote to find an ARC of the book. My heart skipped a beat. (If you think that's silly, well, what are you doing here?) I might as well have been holding a gold brick in my now-sweaty palms. I brought it home & set it on a shelf, where it sat unread by me until last week, when I just couldn't take the anticipation anymore. (Plus my boyfriend, who read it as soon as I brought it home, kept asking, "When are you gonna read Wonderstruck? You really should. Have you read it yet? What about now?")

It didn't disappoint. I devoured it in a matter of hours - & consequently was depressed that it was over.

The book consists of two storylines. One, set in 1977, is told through words. Ben's peaceful life by snowy Gunflint Lake is upheaved when his mother dies. He finds a strange clue in her room, leading him to the American Museum of Natural History on a search for the father he never knew. The other story, set in 1927, is told through pictures. Rose runs away to New York City to see an actress, whose life she follows through newspaper clippings.

There are infinitely more layers to the plot, but that's all you'll get from me. The revelations provided and experienced by the characters are a large part of what makes the book amazing. Every few pages a new piece of the puzzle falls into place, a surprise will make you gasp, a new artifact finds its place in the Cabinet of Wonders. The way that the two stories come together is nothing short of wondrous. Ben's story and Rose's start to converge, mysteries unravel, the stories intertwine, the art & words converge seamlessly to a gorgeous, moving end.

I would say it all feels effortless but that would be a discredit to the amount of effort Selznick puts into his work. As fascinating as the book itself are the endnotes about how thoroughly he researched every facet of the story - the places, the people, the cultures, the art, the history. At BEA (where he wore the most spectacular pair of sparkly red shoes!) he did a presentation on the making of the book, from trips to the museums to walls covered with his illustrations-in-progress. The passion for his art is evident in the time & care he has taken to create it, & to make it as good as he possibly can.

I also very much appreciated his nod to E. L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, one of my all-time favorites. & whether he was actually influenced by it or not, there are a number of likenesses to Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, another all-time favorite.

My only - ONLY! - complaint with the book is that for being such a hefty tome, almost 650 pages, it's over all too soon. I guess I'll just have to reread it a few hundred times. 

Now for the giveaway portion of this update! That's why you're all here, right? I have been lucky enough over the course of the past three months or so to end up with multiple copies of the ARC of Wonderstruck. I kept the autographed one, I've given away a couple to other Selznick fans, but now I have another. & yes, I could hoard all of these Wonderstrucks because they're so spectacular I don't want to part with them, but really, I'll never be able to read more than one copy at a time.

So I am gifting an ARC of Wonderstruck to one lucky reader! In order to win this little informal contest, I'd like you to comment & tell me what you love most about The Invention of Hugo Cabret. There are so many things to love about it. & heck, if you haven't read it, tell me what your favorite children's book is & why. & I will choose at random from the responders.

Comment between now & next Friday, September 2, at noon. After that, I will announce a winner. Please enter, because I mean, I'm just doing this for fun & because I love making people happy by putting books in their hands. Good luck!

Okay for Now

Okay for Now, Gary Schmidt, Clarion Books, April 2011.

I finished Okay for Now months ago & have been waffling over whether or not to review it at all, mostly because it has been reviewed to death, &, consequently, praised to death. But every time I see the book on my shelf, it gives me the warm fuzzies. So I'm gonna add my two cents to the pot.

Okay for Now is the story of 14-year-old Doug Swieteck, who moves with his family - his mild mother, abusive father, and shady brother Christopher - to upstate New York in 1968, to a house Doug calls The Dump. His teachers and the majority of the townspeople write Doug off as a bad kid, but he finds some unlikely shining lights in his new life: friends in the feisty Lil Spicer & an eccentric playwright named Mrs. Windermere, bookplates in the local library of John James Audubon's birds, a job as the deli delivery boy, & the book Jane Eyre.

If it all sounds like just too much, well, I thought so, too. I thought there was no way these elements could be woven together without it seeming like Schmidt was trying too hard. But he did it. Schmidt layers art, theater, friendship, family dynamics, loss, Creativity with a capital C, self concept, inspiration, tragedy, comedy, & so much more, seamlessly, effortlessly. Even when Doug's older brother Lucas returns from Vietnam, broken in every sense of the word, it isn't too much. That Schmidt accomplishes this is in itself a feat. Every element feels necessary & vital to Doug's development. That he does it in a way that is literarily beautiful is even more impressive.

Doug's voice is stellar. His echoes of "So what?" and "stupid" aren't contrived. The way he chooses to share & withhold information from the reader is brilliantly done, making for an original, believable 14-year-old boy. While I, a 26-year-old woman with a tattoo of one of Audubon's birds & a predilection for 19th century British lit, completely ate up the seemingly unrelated plot elements, it is the strength of Doug's voice that enables Schmidt to go into depth about the birds, Jane Eyre, horseshoes, and the theater without losing a young reader's interest, because of how powerful they are to Doug. Impressive, right? I will undoubtedly return to this book again & again, for many reasons, but the main reason is just to spend some more time with Doug. 

Okay for Now is a nearly perfect book. Nearly. I have one major gripe with the book. In the last 30 of the book's nearly 400 pages, Schmidt deals the characters some bad news. I won't go into detail, but this piece of news is so aggravatingly unnecessary that it won't stop nagging me. It WILL. NOT. LEAVE. ME. ALONE. Every time I get the aforementioned warm fuzzies, "What a great book you wrote..." is followed by "Why, Gary Schmidt, why?!" I cannot wrap my brain around it because there is no reason I can see for him to have done this. It serves no purpose except to make a book otherwise perfect in tone, not heavy-handed in any way, unnecessarily maudlin. You could actually go in & remove the revelation, & the message at the end of the book wouldn't have changed an iota. So why?!

I didn't mean for this to turn into a rant. I'm sure not all people feels as strongly as I do about the turn the story eventually takes. In fact, I haven't seen a review yet that mentions this bummer of a plot twist. But it does, in my mind, tarnish the story. & it is so frustrating because the story is otherwise flawless.

That's the thing about a flaw in a really amazing book, though. It can have a flaw & it's still better than most of what's out there. Which is why I agree with everyone: Okay for Now is one of the best books of the year, & I would not at all be surprised if it wins the Newbery.

Okay for Now is a companion novel to The Wednesday Wars, a Newbery Honor book. According to the Seattle Times, Schmidt is planning one more book in the "series."

Lastly, I was going to pepper in some quotes from the book, but there are too many to choose from. Instead, here's one of my favorite passages from the book, from the first conversation between Doug & Lil. Enjoy, & if you haven't picked up the book yet, I encourage you to do so ASAP.

"That's not how you drink a really cold Coke."
"So how do you drink a really cold Coke?"

She smiled, raised the Coke to her lips, and tipped the bottle up.
She gulped, and gulped, and gulped, and gulped, and gulped. The ice on the bottle's sides melted down toward her--and she gulped, and gulped, and gulped.
When she was finished, she took the bottle away from her lips--she was still smiling--and she sighed, and then she squared her shoulders and kind of adjusted herself like she was in a batter's box, and then she let out a belch that even my brother couldn't match, not on his very best day.
It was amazing. It made birds fly out of the maples in front of the library. Dogs asleep on porches a couple of blocks away probably woke up.
She put the bottle down and wiped her lips. "That's how you drink a really cold Coke," she said. "Now you."

    

The Magician King

The Magician King, Lev Grossman, Viking, August 2011.

Today is the official release date of Lev Grossman's The Magician King, so what better day to finally get around to reviewing it? I was still undecided about The Magicians when I picked up the sequel, but after I finished The Magician King I loved them both. They aren't two books; they are two parts to a very satisfying whole.

The Magician King opens on Quentin as a jaded king of Fillory, much like the first book opened on Quentin as a jaded New York teenager. Only now he's more fashionable; he's all decked out in royal garb & the final standoff in The Magicians has left him with snow-white hair. But he's bored (What else is new, right?) & looking for adventure, which quickly finds him. A morning hunt takes a very ugly turn, leading Quentin & Julia to charter a sailing ship to fulfill an errand that takes them to the sheer edge of the world, as well as back to Chesterton, Massachusetts, where Quentin's parents live. At first Quentin's attitude is as aggravating as in book one. "I guess I'll take this awesome ship on an awesome quest. I have nothing better to do. Might as well go kill some time."  But this doesn't last long, thankfully.

What I really appreciate about this book is that Quentin & his comrades change. This didn't happen in the first book, but now, viewing them as two halves of a whole, I can see that they just needed a few extra hundred pages to grow up. Eliot & Janet soften, Quentin matures & learns to stand on his own two feet, & Julia becomes the woman she was always destined to be - which is easily the most badass thing that happens in the book.

Quentin tells half the story, but about every other chapter belongs to Julia, whose voice is angry, powerful, & compelling. We learn what she was up to while Quentin was attending Brakebills & gallivanting around Fillory in book one, & it's a gritty, urban, from-the-ground-up counterpart to Quentin's story of easy success. The dark hunger for magic, for an entry into Quentin's world, fuels Julia & comes close to destroying her. Her story really makes the book. 

The Magician King has it all: well-developed characters, beautiful description, wonderfully varied settings & circumstances, a quest. What is it about books about quests that makes them so awesome? Quentin & Julia are on a quest for the fabled seven golden keys of Fillory, with a fantastic supporting cast of characters (including a talking sloth named Abigail whom I just loved). When I was twelve, my favorite of Brian Jacques's Redwall books was Pearls of Lutra, about a quest for six pearls. My favorite Narnia book has always been The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, about a quest for the seven missing Narnian lords. & my favorite book of all time is Michael Ende's The Neverending Story - the most epic quest ever! - about a boy searching for the archetypal water of life & a way home. 

His nods to Dawn Treader & Narnia, by the way, are many, & I appreciated them very much. Some are subtle, like his use of the phrase "further up & further in" from The Last Battle, while others are more obvious. Grossman's world's end definitely calls to mind the world's end that Edmund, Lucy, Eustace, & Reepicheep discover in Dawn Treader - the pair of people, an old man & a young woman, guarding the door at the end of the world, for example. 

So okay, I'm a sucker for quests. But that also means I'm a harsh judge of quest stories, & Grossman wrote an amazing one. It's a pair of books I will reread over & over, rereadability being one of my marks of a really great fantasy. The ending of The Magician King (also a nod to C. S. Lewis's books) might frustrate some readers, but I thought it was perfect. All in all, a worthy addition to the fantasy canon.

Next up: Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt. 

I Want My Hat Back

I Want My Hat Back, Jon Klassen, Candlewick Press, September 2011

This morning Candlewick tweeted an adorable picture of a gray bunny with a little red paper cone hat taped to his head. (I'm a bunny owner. Stuff like that kills me. Though mine would NEVER allow me to tape anything to his head, & if I somehow managed to he'd rip it off & eat it.) The picture was a hat tip to the upcoming picture book I Want My Hat Back, the debut by author/illustrator Jon Klassen, & when I saw it I realized - How have I not expressed my love for this book yet?!

When my Candlewick rep came to visit in the spring she said, "There is this new book. It's going to be huge. & it is so wonderful I want to read it to you right now." So she did. (Props to Candlewick for having such enthusiastic reps!) It was like preschool story time all over again. She read the book to me - a deceptively simple story about a bear who loses his hat & asks all his friends if they've seen it - & by the end we were both laughing hysterically. A month later at BEA, Jon Klassen was there & I was giddy as 12-year-old me at a Hanson concert to meet him & get my hands on a copy of the book. "This is the best picture book I've read in years!" I gushed. I probably embarrassed him. I gushed to so many people prior to his signing that I ended up in his line with a queue of at least 10 other people to whom I had gushed earlier that day. I am an I Want My Hat Back evangelist, much as I am an Adam Rex evangelist. (Seriously, go buy all of his picture books. You won't be sorry.)

The illustrations are as simple as the plot - soft watercolors in warm browns & black with a dash of red - but they evoke the kind of brilliant dry humor usually only reserved for BBC sitcoms. Catch a glimpse by watching the book trailer. If you don't find the trailer funny, you probably won't find the book funny. & you don't have a sense of humor. I kid.

But not really.

Told entirely in dialogue, the story just begs to be read aloud, & a child reader will be a few steps ahead of the bear in figuring out where his hat went, which makes for fun interactive reading. But, like with Adam Rex's picture books, I concede that grown-ups will get more out of this book about a very droll bear & his missing hat than a child will. I concede also that those grown-ups will need a slightly twisted sense of humor, as - SPOILER ALERT! - the sneaky rabbit who steals the hat gets his, um, just desserts in the end.

Which leads me to a very important point: Kids aren't introduced to enough twisted humor these days! Books like I Want My Hat Back are so vital. It's the quest Maurice Sendak has been on since he started writing: introduce kids to darkness early, so that they'll be able to laugh about it when they grow up. (I paraphrase.) Childhood favorites of mine included Sendak's Outside Over There (kidnapping & a freaky ice baby), Guess What? by Mem Fox (a gloriously messed-up book that you have to see to believe), & In a Dark, Dark Room by Alvin Schwartz (a little girl's head falls off!). I Want My Hat Back isn't horrific in such visual ways; it's very tame by comparison. But it is the people who are in Sendak's camp who will really appreciate the book. The ones who applaud the notion of "You think this book's too scary for kids? So? Wet your pants." (I paraphrase.)

I Want My Hat Back isn't scary, per se. But when you're reading the book with your son or daughter or doing storytime in your library, be prepared to answer the question, "What happened to the rabbit?" & don't sugar-coat it. Because it won't be funny that way.

Lastly, if my evangelism isn't enough, as Levar Burton would say, you can't take my word for it! Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, recommended I Want My Hat Back in a blog post for "Dinner: A Love Story." I too have read the book almost 50 times, & yes, it sustains.

Verdict: You need this book on your shelf to love & treasure & laugh at for years & years. I cannot wait to see what else Jon Klassen has up his sleeve.