By Ed Young
Six blind mice each grab hold of one piece of an enormous Something by the pond, and each one comes home absolutely certain he knows what it is.
There is a Something by the pond and the mice want to know what it is. Red Mouse goes first, on Monday, and comes back saying it's a pillar. Nobody believes him. So Green Mouse goes on Tuesday and says no, it's a snake. Yellow Mouse says a spear. Purple Mouse says a great cliff. Orange Mouse says a fan. Blue Mouse says a rope. Every one of them touched a real part of it and every one of them came home with a different answer, and they argue about it all week. Then White Mouse goes on Sunday and does the thing none of the others did: she runs up one side and down the other, end to end, all over it. It's an elephant. The last page says it out loud, and it's the sentence the whole book was built to hold: knowing in part may make a fine tale, but wisdom comes from seeing the whole.
It gives your child a whole argument in about four minutes, in a handful of words, and the pictures do the rest. Ed Young cuts each mouse out of bright paper and sets it on a black page, so a five-year-old who can't read a word of it can still track exactly who touched what. And here's the part that makes it worth a place on this shelf: none of the six mice is lying. Every single one is honest, careful, and reporting exactly what he felt. They're all still wrong. That's a hard idea and this book hands it over without a word of explanation, which is why it works on a five-year-old and still works on a ten-year-old who has just been told that everyone has their own truth. White Mouse doesn't win because she's cleverer. She wins because she went and looked at all of it.