Princess Comes Home 2: Perfectly Imperfect Tales

This is a memory book dressed as a picture book, and its heart is in the right place: a real cat, a real family, told with the kind of small-scale devotion that makes pet-memoir readers (and cat-owning parents reading aloud) melt a little. The strongest material here is the emotional throughline of Princess as a genuinely imperfect, genuinely loved creature — the title's own phrase, "perfectly imperfect," earns its keep across chapters, from the wobbly aftermath of Spin the Kitty to the Christmas morning discovery of Princess curled asleep in the middle of the tree. That image — humans defeated by their own decorating instincts, cat triumphant and snoozing at the center of it all — is the book's best moment, and it's genuinely sweet without straining for cuteness.

The moving-day chapter is where the emotional and world-building work come together best: Princess retreating to her cat tree for days, then methodically re-learning her jumps ("She missed and hit the side of the couch. She tried again and made it!") is a lovely, patient bit of pacing for young readers about fear, adjustment, and mastery, all through a cat's body language rather than exposition. Debbie Smith trusts small physical beats — a wobble, a paw against a box, a head popping out of a zipper — to carry feeling, which is exactly the right instinct for this age group and this kind of memoir-as-picture-book.

Dialogue given to Princess (imagined meows translated as sass or devotion) is a light, familiar device but deployed with real affection rather than gimmick, and it gives the book its voice. The direct-address asides to the reader ("right, reader?") add warmth without condescension. This is a book for the child who already loves a pet and wants to recognize their own life in someone else's.