By Holling Clancy Holling
A snapping turtle hatches at the top of the Mississippi, loses a leg to a stray bullet in her first week, and spends twenty-five years working her way down two thousand miles of river to the Gulf.
Minn hatches in the sand near Lake Itasca, where the Mississippi is narrow enough to step across. Within days a poacher's stray bullet takes off her left rear leg. An Ojibwe boy finds her, pens her safely in the shallows until she mends, paints MINN across her shell, and carries her a hundred miles downriver before letting her go. After that she is on her own, and the river does the rest: twenty-five years and two thousand three hundred miles of it, past keelboats and river pirates and plantations and locks and floods, down to the Gulf of Mexico. Holling packs every margin with maps, cross-sections and pen drawings, so the river's whole history runs alongside the turtle in the same spread.
The turtle is the trick. A child cannot follow Minn without following the river, and cannot follow the river without reading the map in the margin, so the geography arrives as the price of finding out what happens next. Holling wrote and drew all of it himself over years of traveling the river, and it shows in the specificity: the exact silt, the exact lock gate, the exact boat. Where Paddle is carried along by the current in four years, Minn is a live animal making her own slow way over a lifetime, so this one is heavier, longer, and more grown-up in feel.