Shoe-la-la! by Karen Beaumont

Shoe-la-la! by Karen Beaumont, illustrated by LeUyen Pham

Rating: 3.5 stars

I officially want to dislike this book.  Its cover is a sparkly image of four young girls dressed up far too maturely for their own good.  Let them be kids!  Keep them from wanting to wear high heels and pearls!

Sigh.

I'm sure there is a huge fan base for this book and others like it--books about dressing up and wearing the fanciest shoes in town with your closest girlfriends.  I guess the problem I have with that is that's what I would like to do on some weekends!  I don't want my five year old daughter doing that for, um, three decades!  Okay, maybe two.

These show off my pretty feet. / These look good enough to eat.
Fuzzy boots for when it snows. / Ballerina on my toes!

BUT I am a huge fan of Karen Beaumont and I'm glad I gave the book a chance.  Like all her books, there is a great rhyme that makes the book fun to read.  The very tomboyish girls decide to go find new party shoes, and head to the nearest shop to try on every pair imaginable.  They try on about three dozen each but still can't find a pair they like, so they head back home, empty-handed.

And then, as Ben would say, they used "their own imaginations" and grabbed their old shoes and made them fancy.  Okay, I can deal with an ending like that.  I can easily supply Lorelei with some glue and every art supply I've got in the house and let her go to town decorating those shoes until she is satisfied with the results.  And yup, I'd let her wear them in public.  And yup, if Ben wanted to do it, I'd let him decorate and wear his shoes "of his own imagination" in public, too.  Because why should girls get to have all the fun?

Freckleface Strawberry by Julianne Moore, illustrated by LeUyen Pham

Freckleface Strawberry by Julianne Moore, illustrated by LeUyen Pham

Rating: 4 stars

This is a stretch for books on strawberries...but there aren't many out there!  Hmm...maybe I have found some inspiration to write my own?  Hmm....

This adorable book, and its equally adorable sequels, is by the Julianne Moore, who was a freckleface little girl herself (who grew up to be a big-time Hollywood actress, take THAT you silly kids who teased her about her freckles!).  The illustrations make me wonder how some artists make characters that are just immediately likeable, while other artists fall short.  It's a good story, but Pham certainly helped out the books' popularity with his personality-filled kids stomping around in cartoon-like clusters within the pages of the books.

It's a pretty predictable story: A little girl has freckles and doesn't notice them at all until other kids point out that they stand out.  And we all know that standing out in ANY way in middle school can be totally scary!  The kids around her call her names and taunt her a bit, making her want to hide in silly ways.  Finally, when she comes out from one particularly unwise disguise (a ski mask in summer), a passing mom enlightens her: I had freckles as a child, and they went away.

Whoa!  Good to know!

Our little hero is relieved, and is even more relieved when all the kids at school find her and explain how much they've missed her while she was in hiding.  What?  Teasing is actually a form of love?  Another strange lesson of middle school.  And beyond.

The book is good, though I'd direct them to kids older than five because of the teasing in it.  Call me silly, but I just hesitate to introduce something like that to my kids, who don't do it now and I want to keep them in that bubble of kindness for as long as possible.  But I'm so glad that this book exists--one of our nieces has freckles, and they are so adorable on her already beautiful face that I hope she never feels ashamed of what makes her even more beautiful and more unique.

And this is surely the first book I've reviewed that has a musical based on it!  Check it out here.