Her needs, like a real-life cat’s, are basic-eating, sleeping, snuggling, defecating-and Kerr’s books ventriloquize these imperatives in a manner that both admits their humble nature and respects it, portraying an animal subjectivity that for all its plainness is no less particular in its quirks, and no less worthy of our recognition, than that of a more complex creature. Milne’s Pooh, that portly “Bear of very Little Brain” who says, “Long words bother me.” But Pooh, though self-professedly dense, is still able to participate in adventures that require elaborate, if often misguided, planning, and is aware, besides, of his own intellectual limitations. Mog could be considered a descendant of A.

The sentences are short and of consistent length-not unlike the padded footfalls of a rotund cat-and, in their occasional repetitiveness, mimic a feline’s clumsy thinking. Just like Mog-a stout, friendly tabby with a round face, a white bib, and white paws, who gets into a variety of small domestic scrapes because of her limited grasp of the world around her-Kerr’s language is simple and a little plodding. But it was, perhaps, exactly this limitation that heightened her ability to pinpoint, with a beautiful specificity, the character of her feline protagonist. Kerr, who died in May, at the age of ninety-five, having published more than thirty much beloved books in the course of her career, once said that she tried never to use more than two hundred and fifty words in any of her books, so that young children could follow along. Though this was only the first of Kerr’s “Mog” volumes-which ended up numbering more than a dozen by the time the last of the bunch, “ Goodbye Mog,” came out, in 2002-these opening lines establish the series’ rhythm and sensibility. She was a very forgetful cat.” So begins Judith Kerr’s picture book “ Mog the Forgetful Cat,” published in England in 1970.

Mog the forgetful cat