"Tikki Tikki Tembo" by Arlene Mosel

This review's wordcount is probably a significant fraction of that of the actual book. Tikki Tikki Tembo is not very long.

I freely confess that I don't know very much about ancient Chinese culture. However, from what I do know, this does not seem like a very accurate depiction. It's less "China specifically" and more "Stuff I vaguely heard about Asia once."

This book is one of those "this is how it got this way" stories, which in my opinion are always fairly pointless. In this case, it's explaining why Chinese first names tend to be kind of short, using the tale of a kid named "Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo" who falls in a well. Problems ensue because his name is long and hard to say, which messes up his brother's attempts to tell people he's fallen in a well.

There's a character in this, the Old Man with the Ladder, whose two defining characteristics are "is old" and "has a ladder". He's on the cover; you can tell it's him because he's holding a ladder. I'm not sure what he does with his life.

[EDIT, 3/14/2026: Fixed some truncated sentences in the above paragraph.]

Yeah, this review is short. So is the book. But I had more to say than would fit in a mini-review, so here we are.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. For all its faults, there's nothing really bad in it.

2 stars. If it hadn't been for my first completed quest (which this review is part of), I probably would never have read this book; now that it's over, I probably never will again.

(Endnote: I can't think of an endnote for this post. Maybe I'll just say "Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo" a few times. That name, what with all the times people say it, also probably makes up a significant fraction of the book's wordcount.)