cover image The Wild Things

The Wild Things

Dave Eggers, , read by Dion Graham. . Blackstone Audio, $34.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-4332-9733-5

Each adaptation—from picture book to movie, screenplay, novel, and audio—has diluted the mystery and magic of Sendak’s classic. Dion Graham’s reading of Eggers’s interpretation has little to recommend it. The enigmatic plot is made commonplace; the listener follows the young and troubled Max through a series of banal family problems—arguments with his mother, her boyfriend, and his sister until he runs away and sails to the land of the Wild Things. Graham’s narration is uninspired; he style would be better suited to a spy thriller, and the voices he creates—particularly those of the Wild Things—are more histrionic than otherworldly. (Oct.)