This delightful picture book won the 2000 Governor-General's Award for Children's Literature in French: Illustration for its original version, L'echarpe rouge. To call The Red Scarf the translated-into-English version is to overstate the case for translation: The only words in this book, the first (and last) words, are, " 'Another grey day,' says Turpin, the taxi driver."
Turpin's statement is, as it transpires, ironic. Everything about Turpin's day changes when he delivers his second customer of the day, a mysterious man wearing a black cape, a black top hat and a bright red scarf, to his destination. The man leaves his red scarf behind when he alights from the taxi, and Turpin, a small squiggle of black ink gesticulating wildly, follows his customer past the lizard on a bicycle barring his way, through the curtained entrance and into a striped tent.
A grey day metamorphoses into a head-whirling blur of colour and action. Villeneuve's palette of deep-hued pastels and her wonderfully expressive figures, both human and animal, are a potent and kinetic combination for avid "readers" following the action page by page, scene by scene. They'll watch tiny Turpin dwarfed and endangered by a bear on roller skates, swallowed and disgorged by a lion (with the help of the lion-tamer) and walking a tightrope as he attempts to reunite scarf and owner.
It's perhaps not surprising that sleight of hand provides a climactic ending for this magical book.