The Books

The Moon Jumpers

by Janice May Udry
Illustrated by Maurice Sendak

One Potato Review

A book that is not well remembered about a time that many of us do – namely that magical hour or so on late summer nights before our parents came calling us in. “We climb the tree just to be in a tree at night,” writes Janice May Udry (A Tree is Nice) in lyric, self-evident prose. Sendak alternates black and white drawings with bursts of shadowy color, sunflowers giving way to moths and children who keep attempting to touch the moon, even if they know they never will – still nobody gets too fussed to about it. Warm and elegiac: this is one place the wild things definitely aren’t.