Sit on a Potato Pan, Otis!: More Palindromes [Hardcover]

Jon Agee may be best known for his illustration of children's books ("The Halloween House", "If Snow Falls"). However, he has also proven himself a proficient wordsmith, easily and playfully pulling words all apart and putting them together. "Sit on a Potato Pan" is one of five books delighting in the oddities English spelling.

Palindromes are words or phrases that are spelled the same way forwards as backwards. Take the title of the book and spell it backwards, and it's the exact same title!! These things are not easy to create, and the longer the phrase the more difficult it is to both spell backwards and still make sense. The fact that "Sit...Otis!" is one of THREE books of palindromes by Mr. Agee only proves his genius at manipulating words and letters.

Like his other two books of palindromes, "So Many Dynamos!" and "Go Hang a Salami! I'm a Lasagna Hog!" (now THERE'S one that must have taken a few days to create!!), "Sit...Otis!" is illustrated with wonderful drawings that make the palindrome live and sparkle. For example, in one of my personal favorites, two gents in the Old West are looking at a wanted poster. Pictures of large cats are on the wanted poster, and one man says to the other, "darn ocelots stole Conrad". Another is of three men staring at 9 little pieces of scribbled on paper. They make their own notes about them, and the caption is "some men interpret nine memos".

Needless to say, these things are not easy to write!! Especially the longer, more complicated ones like "naive was I ere I saw Evian" and the one that makes the title of this book. While not a book geared for young children, students in, say, third grade and above would no doubt get a kick out of these and other palindromes. With Mr. Agee as a guide, it's a perfect opportunity for students to go on and create their own. What else is Otis capable of??

While I took this book from the children's shelf of our local library, this "older" kid still loved it. The palindromes are funny and the cartoons that accompany them are well drawn and relate to the palindrome. My favorite is the extension of the classic, "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama" , "A man, a plan, a cat, a bar, a cap, a mall, a ball, a map, a car, a bat, a canal: Panama." Palindromes that are a sensible statement are not easy to write, so the author is to be commended in his ingenuity in constructing such wonders, especially some of the longer ones.
This is a book that can clearly be enjoyed by children of all ages and as soon as I am done with this review, I will be handing it over to my children.

The word palindrome is derived from the Greek word palindromos that means running back again. A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same in both directions. Some elementary examples are: RACECAR, DEED, LEVEL, MADAM, RADAR. The words are spelled the same and read the same from either direction. It wouldn't be too difficult to come up with a list of words with like properties. The challenge comes in creating longer strings of words with the palindromic pedigree that also make some kind of sense.

Jon Agee's pen and ink drawings illustrate and clarify his palindromes, some of which seem to be nonsensical. The subject matter varies widely - businessmen, computer geeks, children, animals, cowboys, musicians, elves, and kings all targets of Agee's insane humor. For the palindrome of the title, we see little Otis sitting on an upside down frying pan with whole spuds lying around him on the floor. Later we see a grocer with a cart full of fruits, all boxed and clearly labeled. The grocer while pushing his cart is announcing to all " No lemons, no melon! We see a large billboard emblazoned with the words "Fruit of the Year." The image of a huge, smiling papaya wearing a fruit of the year sash looks down from the billboard at three little fruits, one of which says ruefully, "NO WAY A PAPAYA WON."

I very much enjoyed "Sit on a Potato, Otis", enough to go around the block with it several more times, each time discovering a little nuance in the illustrations I had missed the previous times around. This is a book with appeal for all ages, though it may be too sophisticated for the very young to understand or appreciate. I would have liked to have seen a listing of the palindromes in the front of the book first so that I could have tried to imagine how they could have been illustrated. This might add another layer of fun to this incredibly enjoyable book.