"Kitten's First Full Moon"

Kevin Henkes won one of his (many) awards for "Kitten's First Full Moon," and it's easy enough to see why. This is a mic-drop book. It's elegant, and it "looks effortless."

Kitten has never seen a full moon, and, reasonably, she concludes that the thing she views is a large milk dish in the sky. She must have that milk. She chases it through valleys, by ponds, down hills. She climbs a tree to reach the milk. No dice.

In the book's climax, Kitten sees the moon reflected on the surface of a lake, and--excited--she believes that the dish of milk is somehow "within" that lake. She hurls herself at the lake and gets drenched, gets very cold. She gives up. It's only upon returning home that she discovers an actual bowl of milk awaiting her. Lucky Kitten!

These are the simplest ingredients. (Like Henkes, the children's-lit icon Tomi Ungerer also had a deep interest in the moon.) By keeping things very "pared-down," Henkes lets us see what makes a story; it's just a journey, even if the journey involves a kitten wandering by a pond. The book also seems to be about the formation of a mind: what we do with experience, how we re-calibrate and get smarter.

I'm obsessed. Five stars.

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