From School Library Journal
PreSchool-Grade 2-A blue man with an elephant nose takes readers on a nickel guided tour through Tippintown, "food included." Each spread's rhyme, presented on the left, is followed by a one-line, droll coda on the right: "We begin at the famous Amelia statue,/here in Tippin Square./As most of you know,/Miss Amelia Tippin/invented the folding chair./Then she became an astronaut,/now she's a millionaire"-"I think that's her over there." The lilt and tone of this nonsense verse can't help but recall Edward Lear. Brown is similarly quirky and irreverent, a satirist without insult. Cross-references abound, from framed images from Brown's other titles, hanging in the Tippin Museum of Art, to repeated design motifs. The tour finishes in the museum's souvenir store stocked with items depicted throughout the book, prompting readers to remember and recap. Brown's distinctive watercolors, in the same hip palette as his Dutch Sneakers and Flea Keepers (Houghton, 2000), adopt a flat folk-art form but then tickle it under the chin with insane details, characters defined by ultramodern styles, and fantasy elements. The wackiness and offbeat sophistication push the art from just plain goofy to meaningfully eccentric. A gleeful book for solo or shared reading.
Liza Graybill, Worcester Public Library, MACopyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
K-Gr. 3. Welcome to Tippintown, where everything is a little bit weird--starting with the tour guide, who has a blue face and an elephant's trunk for a nose. But you haven't seen anything yet: consider the rare Assortment Tree (its "blossoms smell like candy corn and rutabaga tea") or the game-playing gargoyles. If this seems like a fantasy land, the proof arrives at the inevitable souvenir shop, where "everything is absolutely free!" Free? What an imagination Brown has! His often metrically challenged rhyming text doesn't tell much of a story, but it does provide a whimsical launching pad for his double-page pictures, which, though occasionally a wee bit
too evocative of Maira Kalman, are, nevertheless, diverting in their offer of a pleasant excursion for the imagination.
Michael CartCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
