The Cat Who Went to Heaven

This is one of the oldest books on the Library list, and one of the best. The Cat Who Went to Heaven won the second Newbery Medal ever awarded, in 1931, and has been in print continuously since — which, given how many Newbery winners quietly age out of relevance, is unusual. The Aladdin paperback is the easiest edition to find.

The story is built around the legend that when the Buddha died, the animals of the forest came to say goodbye, and the cat alone did not come — and so the cat alone is excluded from the iconography of the parinirvana. A poor Japanese painter is commissioned by the local temple to paint the scene. His housekeeper, who is barely keeping the two of them fed, comes home one day with a small white cat she could not bear to leave on the road. The painter is not pleased. Over the course of the book — which is short, almost a long short story — he and the cat work out a relationship, and the painting begins to take shape, and the question of whether the cat will or will not appear on the scroll becomes the question on which the whole book turns.

Coatsworth braids Jataka tales into the main narrative — short retellings of the Buddha’s past lives as elephant, monkey, deer, swan — so that the book quietly delivers a working introduction to the Jataka literature alongside its own plot. It does this so smoothly that an inattentive reader can miss it entirely, which is exactly right.

This is a serious book about a person who is poor and an animal who is small, and the dignity it grants both is the reason it has lasted ninety years. Give it to a thoughtful 9-year-old. Read it aloud at bedtime in chapter-length pieces. Expect the ending to land.

The Aladdin paperback uses Lynd Ward’s original 1930 woodblock-style illustrations, which are themselves worth the price.