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A Great Picture Book About The Joy Of Doing Things ‘Wrong’
‘The Backward Day’ shows why Maurice Sendak admired its trailblazing female author — and it could inspire hours of spring-break fun for a child
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Young children are natural anarchists. They not only have a gift for creating disorder — they often seem to revel in it.
Perhaps that explains why they love having a “backward day” that lets them do things in reverse order, such as eating dessert first or wearing shirt the wrong way.
Ruth Krauss caught that contrarian spirit perfectly in her classic picture book, The Backward Day. Krauss is best known for The Carrot Seed but also collaborated with Maurice Sendak on eight books, including A Hole Is To Dig. Sendak saw her as a titan in the field and learned so much from her he once said, “She was my school.”
The Backward Day suggests why he or any other authors might revere her. Krauss is less well known than Goodnight Moon author Margaret Wise Brown, her contemporary and fellow member of the Writer’s Laboratory at the Bank Street School in New York City.
But like Brown, the trailblazing Krauss helped to bring children’s literature into the modern era. She did it, in part, by incorporating more naturalism into…