Wild Rumpus

We are an independent children's bookstore in Minneapolis with a penchant for Manx cats and chickens (as well as many other interesting creatures living at our store). During its twenty-year course, Wild Rumpus has had a sort of conversation with the book The Salamander Room by Anne Mazer.   In 1992, we first used this story as a kind of blueprint for building the store.   And today it continues to teach us about books and young people, and about adults who love them. Alone, Brian goes into the woods, discovers a salamander and takes it home to his bedroom.   Each page of the story that follows is driven by his off-stage mother's questions.  And for each question, Brian has an answer.   His answers both accommodate the new salamander and magically transform the world of his bedroom.   Each illustration shows a step in a process that changes a conventional interior to an exterior: gradually walls and ceilings disappear, wildlife moves in and then takes Brian and the reader back out.   And at the end, the last pages show Brian sound asleep in his bed in the woods . . . "and next to me, on the boulder with its head resting on soft moss, the salamander will sleep."