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Hide! The Tiger's Mouth is Open Wide! ISBN: 9781408827093
Chambers, Mark and Frost, Adam
Published by Bloomsbury USA Childrens, 2013
Sophie and Tom live near London Zoo and both their parents work there. When Tom is being difficult about a check-up at the dentist, Dr Sharp promises him that he and Sophie can help him check out the teeth of the animals at the zoo. This turns into a major interest for the children, and after seeing the teeth of Colin the camel, and the pigmy hippo, Harriet, they devise a system for keeping an eye on all the animals with teeth at the zoo When the tiger, Ziggy, stops eating properly, the two children notice right away, and the zoo keepers and Dr Sharp anaesthetise the tiger before performing root canal surgery on him. There is lots of real information about animals and their teeth in the story, but it is all so involved with the plot that the information is made interesting and not at all dry. The children, particularly Tom, come out of the experience full of knowledge about teeth in general and about their own in particular. This is a good option for newly-confident readers with 100 pages divided into 8 chapters, and the line drawings are fun too.
Age: 7+