By Kevin Henkes
A kitten sees her first full moon, decides it's a bowl of milk, and spends the whole night trying to get to it.
Kitten looks up, sees the full moon, and is certain it's a little bowl of milk sitting in the sky. So she goes after it. She licks at it and gets a bug on her tongue. She chases it down the road and never gets closer. She climbs the tallest tree and it's still out of reach. Then she spots it in the pond, jumps in with everything she has, and comes out soaked and cold and no better off. She trudges home, tired and wet and sad, and there on the porch is a great big bowl of milk, waiting for her. The whole thing is told in black and white, in short lines a small child can practically chant along with.
This is the one to hand a cat-obsessed child who is still very small, because the entire book is a kitten being a kitten. She is single-minded about milk, she is bad at judging distance, she gets herself soaked, and every child who has watched a real cat do something ridiculous will recognize her instantly. The lines repeat, so by the second reading your child is saying "Still, there was the little bowl of milk, just waiting" right along with you. And the ending gives them the thing the whole book has been aching for, which for a two-year-old is deeply satisfying. It won the Caldecott, and the black-and-white pictures are a big part of why: they're round and soft and enormous on the page.