In the Night Kitchen
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In the Night Kitchen is a popular and controversial 1970 children's picture book, written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak.
[edit] Plot summary
A young boy named Mickey sleeps in his bed when he is disturbed by noise on a lower floor. Suddenly, he begins to float, and loses his clothes as he drifts into a surreal world called the Night Kitchen.
He falls into a giant mixing pot that has the batter for the morning cake. While Mickey is buried in the mass, three identical bakers, all strongly resembling Oliver Hardy, mix the batter and prepare it for baking while unaware (or unconcerned) that there is a boy inside. As the bakers are about put it in the oven, Mickey emerges protesting that he is not the batter's milk.
To make up for the baking ingredient deficiency, Mickey (now wearing a bodysuit of batter from the neck down) constructs a working airplane out of dough to reach the mouth of a gigantic milk bottle. Using the plane, he flies up to the bottle's opening and dives in. After briefly reveling inside the liquid as his covering of batter disintegrates, he pours the needed milk in a cascade down to the bakers who joyfully finish making the morning cake.
With the dawn breaking, the naked Mickey crows like a rooster and slides down the bottle to magically return to his bed, with everything back to normal beyond the happy memory of his experience.
[edit] Controversy
The book, which features a young prepubescent boy innocently gallivanting fully naked (front and back), has been one of the most challenged books in recent North American history. The book has been banned in various areas, and copies in some libraries have been vandalized (presumably by readers) by application of correction fluid to create "diapers" on the illustrations. In the Night Kitchen regularly appears on the American Library Association's list of "frequently challenged and banned books", reaching #25 on the "100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000." [1]
