By Brendan Wenzel
One cat walks through the world, and every creature who sees him sees something completely different.
The cat walked through the world, with his whiskers, ears, and paws. That line comes back again and again, and each time somebody new looks at him. The child sees a sweet soft pet worth cuddling. The dog sees a small irritating thing. The fox sees dinner. The mouse sees a nightmare with teeth and claws the size of knives. The bee sees him in fractured pieces, the bird sees him from far above, the worm feels him as vibrations in the dark, the bat sees him in sound waves. Same cat, every single time. At the end he looks into water and sees himself, and your child gets to put all of it together.
A child obsessed with cats has usually only considered one cat: the one they want, warm and purring on their lap. This book shows them that the cat is also a monster, a meal, a nuisance, and a blur, depending on who's looking. That's a real thought, and it arrives without a single word of explanation, entirely through pictures. Wenzel changes his whole art style page to page, so the fish's cat is watery and warped and the mouse's cat is all fangs, and your child works out the rule themselves somewhere around the third animal. Then they want to go back to the start. It's a Caldecott Honor book, and it's the rare picture book that gives a small child a new idea to carry around.