Shoes Books

Wow! From the first story in this book (Burnout, about a guy melting like a candle in some Daliaic way to his demise) to the last, I could not put it down. Each story was as unique as it was intriguing and well-written. It's hard to believe the author is only 23 years old! Miss Shoe takes the grotesque and makes the reader revel in it's glory. Oddly, most of the stories are not meant to be "scary" (though most of them did disquiet me more than a little) but sarcastic! This is most notably showcased in the story "Odds and Ends", about a necrophiliac surgeon-turned-mortician-turned-plastic-surgeon again, with results that are as sick as they are hilarious. All in all, a great read, and time and money well spent. I would reccommend this book to anyone with a twisted mind, or looking for something sick and twisted.

Evalina Robertson is a ten year old girl living in turn of the century Edwardsville, a small town on the east coast of the United States. As the story begins, Evalina is surprised and pleased to meet two new girls, complete strangers in a town where everyone knows everyone else, who enroll in Edwardsville's one room schoolhouse. They are Manuela and Fernanda Alvarez, Portuguese speaking sisters whose family has just moved into town. Evalina promptly befriends the two, and is shocked and horrified when the wealthiest (and most unpleasant) girl in town refuses to sit next to "that dirty foreigner" and accuses Manuela of stealing her gold pencil.



After school, Evalina goes home, where she hears her mother wish that she was in somebody else's shoes. Evalina's grandmother tries to explain what the expression means, then teasingly tells her gullible granddaughter that if she slips on somebody else's shoes, she will turn into the person who owns the shoes.



When Grandma sends Evalina to Emil Schultz's shoe repair shop to have the buttons on her Sunday shoes moved, the young girl seizes the opportunity to try on other people's shoes. To her amazement, each pair of shoes makes Evalina experience several hours in the life of the owner, while only two minutes pass in real time.



Evalina first tries on shoes belonging to her grandmother, and finally understands why her grandmother is always saying, "Evalina, be my legs and run upstairs for my knitting," or "Be my eyes, dearie, and read me a chapter." She then tries on shoes belonging to her teacher, Miss Mabel Eakins, and finds out why this young woman has lately been so inflexible and difficult to please. Manuela Alvarez's shoes are next, and Evalina experiences the heartbreak of a false accusation and the warm richness of Manuela's family life. Finally, Evalina tries on Mary Pendergast's shoes, and learns that luxury does not prevent isolation and misery. She also discovers what really happened to the gold pencil.



When Miss Eakins organizes a picnic for the school, Manuela and Fernanda bravely prevent a tragedy, Mary reveals the truth about the theft, and all ends happily, as Evalina concludes, "Wouldn't it be elegant if everybody in the world could try on everybody else's shoes! Then they would know why folks act the way they do, and nobody would ever be mad at anybody else."



Author Kate DiCamillo says, "I read everything I could get my hands on when I was a kid. And I loved it all. Some favorites were: The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Ribsy by Beverly Cleary and a strange little book called Somebody Else's Shoes."



It's a shame this book is out of print and difficult to obtain. The story is charming and well-written, and the message behind it is an excellent one.

This is a slim but beautiful catalog of part of the collection of the Powerhouse Museum in Australia. The shoes themselves are all in color and clearly photographed, the pictures ranging from a couple of inches to an entire page. A few of the smaller ones were a trifle hard to see and would have benefited from being enlarged.

There are also a number of historic photographs, mostly black and white, as well as color reproductions of paintings and advertisements to add historical context.

The introductory matter explains the history of the collection and gives an explanation of shoe-making. The shoes are mainly arranged chronologically with a few introductory paragraphs relative to the period. All the shoes are labelled, but details are give in a Shoe-List section in the back. Of particular interest is the section on Australian shoes which is a valuable supplement to more general histories of shoes. There is also a list of further reading.

This collection of twelve short stories has themes of family, ghosts, magic and myth, poverty, mental illness and charity. Some of the stories are connected to each other, or have similar characters, so that the stories as a collection form an entertaining and engrossing anthology. The author is also a poet, and some of her poems feature in the stories, or link the tales together. She has a good sense of character and place, and her tales are set in many different places and time periods, from 1560s to 1860s to 1960s and in places as diverse as Cafarthfa Castle in Wales, London, Paris, Rome and a magical island that cannot be found on any map.
This island features in two of the stories, The Island of Jewels and The Mysterious Island, and in both cases the characters are banished there by the Gods for wanting to be something they are not. On the island they are to learn to be grateful for what and who they are, and this theme is echoed in the other stories, as in Is Life What you Make It, where Constance has continual bad luck in contrast to her wealthy sister, and also Poverty House in which young Connie has to steal things to improve her life and that of her sisters. Sisterhood is also featured widely in the stories, with four of the tales having three sisters, of whom one is the principal character.
One of the most engrossing stories is The Ballerina and the Shoemaker, in which a young ballerina asks a shoemaker to maker her some ballet shoes. However, she never returns for them, so the shoemaker goes to where she is supposed to be performing and discovers that she has been killed by a tram. An old woman at the theatre tells him that she was a talented and promising dancer but was obsessed with her own mortality and always wanted to be buried with her ballet shoes. That night, the shoemaker is visited by the ballerina's ghost, who continues to plague him and the opera house until the shoes are hung on her grave. A poem on her grave stone reads, "My face will never grow old while I'm sleeping; As my spirit is entrusted to God's keeping." This poem, The Mirror of My Youth, links this story to that of The Mont Blanc Pen, in which a lonely old man, Francis, begins to write wonderful and strange poetry after being given a beautiful pen by a friend. The words do not seem to come from his own imagination, but rather through a ghost or spirit who delivers the words to him, two lines at a time. The old man cannot cope and soon suffers a nervous breakdown, and is admitted to a mental hospital.
A similar fate befalls no less than three characters in these stories, two of whom are poets or writers, and indeed a fair number of the stories have suffering as their theme -the woman whose house is about to be repossessed; the son abandoned by his mother for his deformities; the man whose generosity and charity backfires when he loses all his money. The recurring themes give the collection a pleasing symmetry.
O'Sullivan's poetry is very good, and the way in which she incorporates it into the stories is subtle and stylish. it is of a very different tone to her prose, proving she is a talented writer in different mediums. This is an enjoyable collection of short stories, on interesting and varied subjects.

This book is beautifully written and illustrated for children beginning to read chapter books. I was surprised that some of the other books in the series were out of print: Tashi and the Genie, Tashi and the Baba Yaga. I've bought some other Tashi books and look forward to reading these with my kids: Tashi and the Ghosts, Tashi and the Big Stinker, Tashi.

This book is awesome! lots of research to support the practical and meaningful activites/lessons!

When we recieved this item and it wasn't quite what we thought it was going to be but the seller made up for this by telling us to keep the book plus gave us a full refund. It's nice to know there are honest people in the world. It made me trust this seller very much.

If you grew up in the 1920's,30's or 40,s in a city or surburban environment this book is for you.There are 50 drawings (suitable for framing) of childhood memories of;Listening to the radio.the junk man,the milk man,grandma's pies,curtain stretching and lots of other things we kids did in the good old days.

After spending some time trying to teach my 3 year old how to tie his shoes. I found "Tie A Bow, Ben Bunny". Shortly after we got this book he was not only tying his shoes but begging to tie mine as well. This is a sturdy book, it has very colorful laces which makes learning how to tie fun. The child will need to know right from left for this book. It teaches using the bunny ear method(loop to loop). What a great book:)

A well-written and exhaustively researched biography of a man whose rise and fall made great impacts on two distant communities: Moltonborough, NH and Jamaica Plain, MA. Jamaica Plain was the location of the immense shoe factory Plant built in 1896 (burned in 1976), and Moltonborough remains the location of his 6,000 acre estate "Lucknow" (more commonly known as "the Castle in the Clouds").