Moonlit meanderings, wordless wonders

Sweet, merry, humorously told, ''Kitten's First Full Moon" is a patterned and rounded tale of the little kitten who is experiencing the first full moon of her life. Bowls of milk she knows well, and so she assumes that what's actually the moon must also be ''a little bowl of milk in the sky." For the next 20 pages, kitten reaches, chases, climbs after that heavenly orb, even jumping after the moon's reflection in the pond, until finally, wet and hungry, the little thing toddles on home again to find -- ''just waiting for her" -- you can guess! The illustrations are black, white, shades of gray, on slightly tinted paper, and the 200 moons on the endpapers are a lark.

Henkes is patently steeped in the American illustration tradition of his childhood: Ruth Krauss, Crockett Johnson, Garth Williams, Maurice Sendak. In the case of ''Kitten's First Full Moon," previously reviewed in the Globe, a reader so inclined may well find Henkes's homage to his fellow Midwesterner and fellow Caldecott honoree Wanda Gag (1946). Feline descendants of Gag's ''Millions of Cats" (1928) may be revisited in Henkes's book, and the concluding pages of both books speak to each other loud and clear, across the years.