Old Turtle

This is the cross-tradition picture book on the Library list. It does not belong to any single religion and it does not pretend to belong to any single religion — what it has, instead, is the recognizable structural shape of a parable in the tradition that includes the Buddha’s Blind Men and the Elephant, the various rabbinic stories about disputes, the Sufi anecdotes about the multiple-tongued truth. Old Turtle is what happens when you take that genre and render it as an American children’s picture book.

The argument runs long, which is the point. The wind says God is like a great wind — God is movement, breath, change. The stone says God is unmoving and permanent. The fish says God is wet. The mountain says God is solid. The night says God is darkness; the dawn says God is light. Each creature is sincerely right about a piece of it, and sincerely wrong about the whole, and the argument grows until Old Turtle — who has been silent through the whole book — finally speaks.

What Old Turtle says is itself worth quoting carefully, and we won’t spoil it here. Then humans arrive in the story. They take up the argument where the creatures left it. They invent wars over it. They hurt each other and the natural world and themselves over it. And eventually they remember what Old Turtle said. The book ends in a quiet hopeful pause that is one of the more carefully earned endings in the picture-book canon.

Cheng-Khee Chee’s watercolours are most of the visual register — vast, soft, sumi-e-influenced, color-washed in the way that some of the best Asian-American watercolourists work. The book has the quality of a held breath visually.

Old Turtle won the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year in 1992 and has stayed in print continuously since. It belongs on a children’s shelf alongside the explicitly tradition-bound books on this list because it is what those books are quietly all saying, in their different ways. For a child who has read Zen Shorts and The Three Questions and is starting to ask “but are these the same things?” — this is the answer. Recommended particularly for interfaith households and any classroom doing a comparative-religions or world-cultures unit.