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Serendipity’s Footsteps
CCBC Review:
A pair of shoes is the constant among stories across decades in a novel that begins in Berlin in 1938. Dayla, the daughter of a Jewish cobbler, has made a pair of pale pink, embroidered shoes to wear when she eventually weds. In 2013, Ray and Pinney are runaways from a group home in Texas. Pinney, whose full name is Chopine, loves shoes. She wants to go to New York because she’s seen a picture of a tree full of lost shoes there. On it is the pair she’s sure her mother was wearing before her mother got lost. Ray is running away from embarrassment and hopelessness. She doesn’t want Pinney along, but Pinney has a way of attaching herself. On the trip, Pinney, who has Down syndrome, has brought along the pair of graying pale pink embroidered shoes that Ray stole from a thrift store and cast off in hurt and anger the night before they left. How the shoes got from then to now and there to here, what happened to Dayla, what happened to Ray and Pinney before they ever met, and what happens to them next are all revealed in this intricate, emotionally generous novel that invites readers to believe in a little of what Pinney thinks of as magic. ©2015 Cooperative Children's Book Center
CCBC Age Recommendation: Age 13 and older
Age Range:
Grades 6-8 (Ages 11-13)
Grades 9-12 (Age 14 and older)
Format:
Novel
Subjects:
Embarrassment
Friendship
Grief and Loss
Historical Fiction
Holocaust
Hope and Healing
Jewish People
Perspective/Point of View
Diversity subject:
Jewish
Cognitive/Neurological Disability/Condition
Publisher:
Alfred A. Knopf
Publish Year: 2015
Pages: 361
ISBN: 9780385392129
CCBC Location: Fiction, Nelson