The Blue Shoe
A Tale of Thievery, Villainy, Sorcery, and Shoes
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- ¥710
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- ¥710
発行者による作品情報
It was only one shoe. It fit no one. But everyone wanted it.
Hap Barlo sits in a cell, wondering how it had all gone so wrong. The blue shoe was ruined, the girl he’d been trying to help was missing, and he’d been branded a thief—again! He would be banished to the far side of Mount Xexnax in the morning.
On the bright side, now he might be able to rescue his father, who had been banished last year. No one has ever returned from Xexnax, so perhaps Hap is a tad optimistic to be dreaming of rescue. Then again, perhaps a dreamer, a doer, and a thief is just the kind of boy who could challenge this mountain—and win!
First edition will be printed in blue ink!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Townley's (The Red Thread) overly complicated fantasy stars 13-year-old Hap Barlo, a smart, nimble-fingered cobbler's apprentice who is also an unwilling thief. The slippery story line is founded on a mysterious bejeweled blue shoe in a cobbler's window in the town of Aplanap, but the action soon begins to alternate between Aplanap and a prison in a faraway mine, where the prisoners (in a plot element reminiscent of Holes) daily dig deeper toward some unknown purpose. The enormous cast of characters includes a pompous mayor and his greedy wife, a good-hearted cobbler and his hungry dog, an evil prison warden, a feisty, fearless girl with a crush on Hap, and numerous, hard-to-distinguish Aukis, a blue-skinned, human-hating race with an almost-human language (in which Hap is fluent a skill that proves crucial). GrandPr 's (the Harry Potter series) b&w illustrations create an appropriately furtive ambience and partner well with the tongue-in-cheek narrative voice. The convoluted plot culminates in a predictable frantic battle scene in the mine, but the mystery of the blue shoe and other aspects of the saga are not fully resolved until the story returns to Aplanap. Ages 8 12.
