HOWL

A rotten day can be fixed in the middle of the night.

Maggie’s opening litany of woes calls back to Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: “the sun was the wrong shape, in a sky that was too blue. / Then, Maggie’s shoes would not go on properly. Her socks were even worse. / … / Finally, the spaghetti was too long.” At night, bright moonlight streams in, and nobody wants to go to bed. After Maggie and her mom each “almost explode,” Maggie bursts outdoors and rages herself into a wolf, evoking Where the Wild Things Are. Here, however, Maggie needs help expressing her feelings, and Mom joins her outside. Together they howl, prowl, and “dance…wildly under the moon.” Their newly lupine bodies—Maggie’s fangs; Maggie’s and Mom’s “long tails with bristling fur”—are only textual, never shown; however, their shadows look exactly like wolves. Maggie wears overalls and then red-striped pajamas. Illustrations are bright and sketchy, with a loose, windblown feeling and colored-pencil lines going everywhere in all directions; this matches Maggie’s frustration and then her freedom, though the visual mood doesn’t appreciably calm down when Maggie’s mood does. Maggie’s and Mom’s skin is the flat white of the background paper. Pair with Kyo Maclear and Isabelle Arsenault’s brilliant Virginia Wolf (2012).

This can’t match its classic ancestors, but it can play with them.