Tippy and the Night Parade by Lilli Carré

Carré skillfully employs a limited color palette, with warm oranges underscoring the messy mayhem of Tippy’s room and cool midnight blues and slate grays providing a serene backdrop for Tippy’s late-night ramblings. Young readers will delight in all the crazy details: the mice dancing on the headboard of Tippy’s bed the mole’s hilarious devotion to the bear the goat chewing Tippy’s hair as the story ends. Tippy’s calm, sleepy suppositions clash deliciously with the gradually increasing disorder found in the accompanying panels. In her first book for young children, cartoonist Carré repeats key phrases in the text to help beginning readers. Carré’s retro and dreamy illustrations readily lend themselves to visual literacy practices: kids can “ham it up” with sound effects (bumps, scrapes, and animal sounds), and parents and educators can let children guess about the context of the pictures.Ī beguiling tale of a girl who sleepwalks into a midnight-blue dreamscape, leaving her with a mysteriously messy bedroom-and a bird on her head.While respectably hardcover and didactically appended with suggestions for reading guidance, “Tippy” uses the paneled art and speech balloons of comics and displays its downtown roots through an offbeat color palette (cantaloupe, chocolate and gunmetal blue), blithe generalization of form and a bed-headed heroine who looks as much the hipster gamin as she does a little girl.

Consistent with the Toon Book line, tips for reading comics with children appear in the back matter. This quirky comic for early readers offers simple panels with easy-to-find details and monochromatic color schemes–orange for the day and shades of blue for the night.

While respectably hardcover and didactically appended with suggestions for reading guidance, “Tippy” uses the paneled art and speech balloons of comics and displays its downtown roots through an offbeat color palette (cantaloupe, chocolate and gunmetal blue), blithe generalization of form and a bed-headed heroine who looks as much the hipster gamin as she does a little girl.

Tippy and the Night Parade by Lilli Carré