by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 15, 2009   Last Updated: May 11, 2009

"Fox in Socks" has always been one of my favorite Dr. Seuss books, mainly because it's got more rhymes! The first twelve sentences all rhyme with each other, even though some of them are just one word long. ("Fox. Socks. Box. Knox...") It's a great teaching tool for children, because it's repeating the same sounds over and over again. But it does it in a very entertaining way, as a slick red fox teases his friend with outrageous tongue twisters...next to some of Dr. Seuss's funniest illustrations!

"Look, sir. Look, sir. Mr. Knox, sir. Let's do tricks with bricks and blocks, sir."

Dr. Seuss was already a master of the silly rhyme, but in this book he takes the rhymes to the next level. There's rhymes within sentences - and even entire phrases are repeated, sometimes with only one word changed in the following sentence. Yet somehow through all this, he manages to tell a story. It's a story about fox who likes to play rhyming games - and a man named Knox, who doesn't share the same level of enthusiasm.

"Mr. Fox! I hate this game, sir. This game makes my tongue quite lame, sir."

Dr. Seuss was already 61 years old, and it's fun to imagine that his sympathies lie with the frumpy Mr. Knox, who stares in amazement as the fox produces more creatures and activities to describe with rhyming words. There's chicks with bricks - and chicks with blocks. Soon the fox is demonstrating the fact that they can build a "quick trick brick stack" (followed, of course, by a "quick trick block stack.") Dr. Seuss loved stories where the pictures kept getting more and more complicated. By the end, the fox is presenting a pair of fighting tweetle beetles - in a puddle, fighting with paddles, in a bottle. (Which, of course, is a tweetle beetle bottle puddle paddle battle muddle....) In the end Mr. Knox simply storms off in a huff - after stuffing the fox into the bottle himself.

But this book is a good way to appreciate the magic that was Dr. Seuss. From his very first book in 1937, Dr. Seuss loved drawing fantastic scenes and then finding a story to justify them. And "Fox in Socks" may be one of the purest examples, since there's no message - beyond simply the joy of rhyming and playing with words. The more entertaining it is, the more effective it is as a teaching device. Since this book is marketed as "beginner's book," it's really teaching the most importance lesson of all: the joy of reading.

"Fox in socks, our game us done, sir. Thank you for a lot of fun, sir."

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