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Go Go and the Silver Shoes (Jane Godwin, illus by Anna Walker, Viking)

Jane Godwin and Anna Walker are a winning pair: Walker’s tender, beautiful illustrations are a perfect complement to Godwin’s careful, gentle words. Their previous successes include the reassuring Starting School and the wishful Today We Have No Plans. In this story, Go Go, who loves choosing new shoes and underwear because they’re the only things she doesn’t inherit from her three big brothers, loses one of the most beautiful shoes she has ever owned. The shoe’s brief adventure is interspersed in lovely wordless spreads with Go Go’s subsequent odd-shoed existence. While the story is suitable for young attention spans, it is still richly textured with minute, considered detail. Characters and events are poetic and unique. The illustrations, similarly, are clean and delicate yet filled with loving detail, such as the half-hidden wildlife watching the shoe’s passage downstream and the artwork on walls at home and school. This is complemented by Walker’s expressive and unpretentious character faces. Go Go is a delight: sure of herself at school despite judgement by less open-minded children, and immediately generous and warm with new girl Ellie. The resolution is charming and grounded. It exhibits classic Godwin-Walker positivity that delights while side-stepping saccharine sentiment.

Anica Boulanger-Mashberg is a freelance editor and writer, and a bookseller at the Hobart Bookshop

 

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