Night sixty of the only book

My niece is four and has decided this is the only book. We are somewhere around night sixty.

Botanically it is nonsense and it is the good kind of nonsense. The forest that grows in Max's room is an assemblage that exists nowhere on earth: fronds that read as tree fern, something doing a passable impression of a monstera, palms, and a great deal that is simply Sendak drawing until it felt like a forest. I have looked at those spreads more closely than any adult should and the thing I keep noticing is that the plants get larger and denser as his mood does, page by page, until they are running off the edges. That isn't botany. That is staging, and it's beautifully done.

What nobody warns you about, being handed it again at forty five, is how far it is really a book about his mother, who never appears once. The supper is still hot! Ten words and the whole thing resolves.

Eight rather than more only because the wild rumpus goes on slightly longer than my niece's attention does, which I accept is not Sendak's fault.