Kitten's First Full Moon

A small, hungry kitten sees the full moon for the very first time and is entirely certain it is a bowl of milk hanging in the sky. She stretches her tongue toward it and catches only a bug. She chases it across the yard and gets nowhere. She climbs to the top of a tall tree to reach it and finds herself stuck and frightened instead. Finally she spots what looks like the same bowl of milk reflected in a pond below and leaps in after it, coming out soaked, exhausted, and no closer to a meal. She trudges home defeated, and only on the very last page does the kitten discover an actual bowl of milk waiting for her on the porch, which she drinks gratefully before falling asleep, full and content, under the same moon that started the whole ordeal.

Kevin Henkes tells the story almost entirely through black and white pictures, kitten and moon rendered in soft grays and heavy black outlines against plain white space, with the sparse text set in large, simple type built for a child just learning to follow words on a page. The repeated structure, another failed attempt, another disappointment, gives very young listeners a rhythm they can predict and enjoy predicting, and the quiet nighttime palette makes it a natural choice for reading right before bed. Henkes has said the whole story grew from a single line about a cat mistaking the moon for milk in one of his earlier books, expanded here into a complete, wordless feeling arc of hope, failure, and comfort.