The Red Shoes

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The Red Shoes

Ursula Dubosarsky

Funny, tough-minded and tender, this is the story of Matilda and her two sisters growing up in Sydney, Australia, in the early 1950s. Their father is mentally unstable and largely absent, their mother is possibly in the thrall of his brother, and a headline-making Russian spy defection is taking place next door. Punctuated by the headlines of the times, The Red Shoe depicts how the large events of the world can impinge on ordinary lives. This is a novel to savor by one of Australia's most gifted writers for young people.

1 Vote

Book Details

Genre:

Fiction
Juvenile Fiction

Age Level:

12 and up

The Red Shoes review by MW

Matilda, a young girl of age six, and her sisters Elizabeth and Frances are the stars of The Red Shoe, a novel written by Ursula Dubosarsky. At the beginning of the story, Frances reads Matilda a fairytale about a young girl who was not allowed to wear a pair of beautiful red shoes. Throughout the novel that absence of freedom is portrayed as the young girls describe their mother , father, and uncle. Their mother is a pretty woman lonely in the absence of their father--and their uncle always seems to be around for her.