You might even argue that the BEST children’s books touch on this in some way ( Where the Wild Things Are being the most obvious example). There also exist in this world picture books that touch on this restrained/free duality.

A wild, untamable creature that will emerge without fail at the worst possible moments, rendering its parents helpless and hopeless all in one swoop. Tweed’s Good Deeds, Monsters & Legends, Shackleton’s Journey, Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space, and Hug Me.There lives in every child an animal. Wild is one of the loveliest and most endearing picture-books I’ve seen this side of the century and comes from British indie publisher Flying Eye Books, unending source of treasures like Mr. It is an invitation, at once tender and mischievous, to pause and ask, as Mary Oliver memorably did: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” The little girl is frightened, but mostly perplexed.Īnd she did not understand, and she was not happy.īecause you cannot tame something so happily wild…Įmanating from the playful and poetic story is a clarion call to shake off the external should’s that shackle us and stop keeping ourselves small by trying to please others, to celebrate what John Steinbeck called “the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected”. “FAMED PSYCHIATRIST TAKES IN FERAL CHILD,” a newspaper headline proclaims. Off in the big city, a somewhat well-meaning but rather dictatorial elderly couple sets out to de-wild her. One day, two creatures who look an awful lot like her, only bigger, appear out of nowhere, put her in the belly of their metal beast, and hurl her into a wholly different new life - a civilized one. She is boundlessly, ebulliently wild, and wholly unashamed of her wildness.

The story opens with a joyful and carefree little girl native to the woods, raised by the creatures of the whole forest. More than 150 years later, Hawaiian-born, British-based illustrator Emily Hughes makes an imaginative 21st-century case for this in Wild ( public library | IndieBound) - an irreverent, charming, and oh-so-delightfully illustrated story, partway between Kipling’s The Jungle Book and Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. “All good things are wild and free,” Thoreau wrote in his terrific treatise on walking.

Wild book emily hughes