Seven Blind Mice

Young, Ed. Seven Blind Mice. New York: Puffin Books, 1992.

The 1992 Caldecott award winning “Seven Blind Mice” is an exquisite children’s book that tells the story of how seven tiny creatures use their sense of touch to figure out what “strange something” has come to their pond and each come up with a different answer. This story is told by the point of view of an outsider and is a perfect combination of textual and artistic elements to make the reader fully understand the moral of the story.

The illustration is what makes this book such a great read. The whole book has the same backdrop of black that gives the reader the feeling of being blind like the mice. Each mouse has its own bright color and the mouse’s thought of what the “strange something” is has the same color as well. It is Ed Young’s use of a textured, cut-paper technique to help the readers see how an elephant’s tail just dangling there can be mistaken for a rope and an elephant’s sturdy trunk can be mistaken for a spear.

So all these elements aide in the moral of the story which is the theme of most fables and that moral is “Knowing in part may make a fine tale, but wisdom comes from seeing the whole” (Young 39). Ed Young tells a fantastic story that children can understand with the aide of the pictures and gives them something to think about at the end.