The Great Race: The Story of the Chinese Zodiac

Every Chinese New Year, families with young children try to explain the zodiac — why the rat is first, why there’s a dragon mixed in with all the real animals, why the cat got left out — and every year someone reaches for a book to do the explaining. The Great Race is the book worth reaching for.

Christopher Corr is a British illustrator who works in flat, ultra-saturated gouache: heroic reds, bright blues, big simple shapes. The visual style is not Chinese and doesn’t pretend to be; it’s a contemporary picture-book idiom applied to a Chinese folktale. That choice could have gone wrong. It doesn’t, because Corr is a strong draughtsman and the colour discipline is real — every spread reads as a single composed image first and as storytelling second.

The story is the standard zodiac origin tale: the Jade Emperor invites all the animals to a great race across a river, the first twelve to finish will each get a year named after them in turn. The rat hitches a ride on the ox’s back and then leaps off at the last moment to win. The tiger arrives soaked, the dragon paused to make rain on the way, the snake winds out of the horse’s hoof. Each animal gets a moment and a personality, which is exactly what children want from a zodiac book — they want to be told who they are, and a parent can flip to the right page.

The structure makes this an excellent New Year read-aloud across many years running. A 4-year-old listens for the animals. A 7-year-old looks for herself in whichever year she was born. A 9-year-old asks why the cat wasn’t invited, and there is now an opening for a much longer conversation about rats and cats and grudges that lasts thousands of years.

The strongest zodiac picture book in English. Pairs naturally with Lon Po Po and Yeh-Shen on a Chinese New Year display.