Orangutan Tongs
Poems to Tangle Your Tongue
by Jon Agee
Disney/Hyperion Books, 2009. 48 pages.
Starred review.
Sonderbooks Stand-out 2010: #2 Picture Books
This book is entirely too much fun. I brought it home and read it to my teenage son, and, as I suspected, he couldn’t resist trying it himself. For Dr. Seuss’s birthday, we recently had a tweetle beetle binge from Fox in Socks, so it was fun to read to each other and laugh from a new book where I didn’t have the advantage of about forty years of practice.
Orangutan Tongs (Can you resist saying that title aloud?) is a book of tongue twister poems, with illustrations. They are all quite silly and good for fun and laughter.
My son claimed that he had not been practicing, but I found it highly suspicious that when I came home from work the next day, he was suddenly able to recite the Peggy Babcock poem:
Peggy Babcock at work. Peggy Babcock at play.
Peggy Babcock tomorrow. Peggy Babcock today.
Peggy Babcock, repeated, is tricky to say:
Peggy Babcock, Peggy Babcock, Peggy Babcock, ole!