TOON Books Launches Silly Lilly iPhone-iPad App

Parents and children can now enjoy the spunky and whimsical Silly Lilly in the Four Seasons anywhere with the convenience of an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. With narration available in English, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish, parents can entertain and educate children with this critically acclaimed easy reader.

Selected as a Best Children’s Picture Books by Publishers Weekly when it was released, Silly Lilly in the Four Seasons by Agnès Rosenstiehl (recipient of the prestigious Grand Prize for Children’s Books of the Société des Gens de Lettres) was described as “perfect for new readers” by the School Library Journal. “Comic moments…draw us directly into Lilly’s emotional world, where attention is routinely paid to everything, from a lowly dandelion on up,” remarked the eminent critic Leonard S. Marcus in a starred review.

Unique features of the TOON Books iPhone/iPad app include:

• Lively narration that brings the story to life. Onscreen text and highlighted speech balloons help readers make associations between the words they hear and see. It is the closest experience to being read a book that any app can deliver. As with all TOON Books, repeated use builds reading fluency.


• The carefully chosen vocabulary is recommended by educators for young children; the app is designed specifically for young readers for ease of use, with easy-to-read large type and pages that can turn automatically or be swiped back-and-forth manually for a true feeling of turning the page.


• Narration is available in five languages – English, Spanish, French, Russian and Mandarin Chinese. The interactive options immerse young readers in the story, making this a great tool for both English Language Learners and very young English speakers learning a new language. There’s no better way to introduce a child to a new language than with the universal language of comics.

Silly Lilly is the American counterpart to Mimi Cracra, the star character of over 100 books and a television show in France. The TOON Books line recently expanded with hardcover bilingual French/English editions published in France by Casterman, the most recent of which is Silly Lilly in the Four Seasons (more information at TOON-books.com).

TOON Books’ Editorial Director Françoise Mouly (who is also Art Editor of The New Yorker) launched the new line of comics for young readers to overwhelming praise.Vetted by educators and librarians, the collection is a breakthrough in books for early readers, now used in K-2 classrooms throughout the US. The Silly Lilly app follows Jack and the Box by Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer-Prize author of MAUS (featured in the LA Times and Apple’s April 2010 “What’s Hot”, and among the 10 ten apps in France upon release) as well as Little Mouse Gets Ready, by Jeff Smith, the author of the bestselling Bone books, as the third iPhone/iPad app released by TOON Books and iStoryTime, the leader in iphone children’s books.