HUNGRY JIM

When Jim wakes up as a lion with a “beastly” appetite, it takes him a while to learn impulse control.

Rightly and properly dedicated to Maurice Sendak, the tale takes Jim—waking at his mother’s invitation to pancakes and thinking that “she sound[s] delicious”—on a rampage that has him gobbling down his parent (“She was delicious”) and everyone he meets. Even as he does this, however, he feels worse and worse about it and finally remorsefully coughs his victims back up one by one, becoming a boy again hungry only for pancakes (plus perhaps a large bear for an appetizer). Enhanced by familiar lighting, angles, and stagey perspectives, Groenink’s illustrations have a similarly psycho-Sendakian cast, centering on a magnificently leonine protagonist with lightly anthropomorphized features who bounds down a street of antique, neatly drawn shops and into a gloomy forest. He discreetly does his chowing down (aside from the occasional glimpse of ankle or empty shoe) and urping up out of sight (except for one delighted child who emerges, smiling, on the sidewalk following a “braap”). Upon returning to his bedroom, Jim is transformed into a small but jaunty white lad in pajamas. Aside from the bear, his similarly light-skinned provender ends up sprawled on the ground, disheveled and astonished but unharmed.

A reassuring promise that it’s OK to be beastly: The pancakes will still be there, and they’ll be hot.