Seven Blind Mice - Controversial

I chose the book, Seven Blind Mice, written by Ed Young as my controversial book. In this book, there are seven mice who see a new, foreign object by their pond. None of the mice can tell what the object is and each day of the week a differet mouse goes to try and figure out what the object is. Each time a different mouse went to look at the object, they interperated it differently so no one could figure out what the object was. We eventually find out the object is an Elephant but here is what the mice saw...On Monday, the red mouse thought the foot was a pillar, on Tuesday the green mouse thought the trunk was a snake, on Wednesay the yellow mouse thought the tooth was a fany or spear, on Thursday the purple mouse thought the head was a great cliff, on Friday the orange mouse thought the ear was a fan, on Saturday the blue mouse thought the tail was a rope and finally on Sunday the white mouse went to the pond to look at the object. The white mouse put all the clues together and discovered that the unknown object was an elephant. The elephant was sturdy as a piller, supple as a snake, wide as a clif, sharp as a spear, breezy as a fan and stingy as a rope. The end of the books has a quote saying, "Knowing in part may make a fine tale, but wisdome comes from seeing the whole"

The reason that this book was controversial was because people believed that by having the white mouse be the one who finally figured out what the object was, it was implying that whites are superior to everyone else. People said it was promoting white supremcy becaues the white mouse was the smartest and the only one able to put all the puzzle piece together to figure out that the object was an elephant. I also think the book promoted dangeroug objects because each object the mice thought they saw were dangerous, disturbing things such as a rope, a spear, a cliff, a fang etc...

This book received a Caldecott Honor Book Award

Young, Ed. Seven Blind Mice. New York: Scholastic Inc., 1992