The night Kitten sees her first full moon, she thinks it's a little bowl of milk in the sky, and she wants it. She jumps at it, and chases it, and climbs a tall tree all the way to the top, but still she can't reach it, poor Kitten. When she sees its milky white reflection in a pond, she even jumps in the water, but all she gets is wet. This simple but enticing Caldecott winner was drawn in silvery shades of gray gouache (opaque watercolors) and colored pencil, with the adventurous white kitten outlined in thick black lines. In a perfect balance between words and pictures, notice how the illustrations reveal more about the story than the words provide. Notice the composition of the pictures—sometimes full-paged, sometimes in panels —and how they advance the action.

From the moon-filled endpapers to a satisfying story with an ending that might remind you of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are without the monsters, this is a flawless picture book for young listeners, just waiting to be acted out. Read it aloud a second time, and have your children play the kitten as she tries doggedly for the moon and ends up with a nice bowl of milk waiting for her back home after all. As they’ll say, in a memorable line from the story, “What a night!”

Themes: ANIMALS. CATS. CREATIVE DRAMA. MOON.