Mrs. Toggle's Beautiful Blue Shoe

During recess, teacher Mrs. Toggle decides to join her students for an energetic game of kickball, but when she accidentally loses her shoe, it is up to the entire class to rescue it from its perch high up in a tree.

Grade 1-4-Spring weather puts a kick in Mrs. Toggle's class and in her foot. Feeling like a kid again, she joins the children's kickball game, loses a shoe up a tree, and calls upon her students to help her get it down. As in Mrs. Toggle's Zipper (1990) and Mrs. Toggle and the Dinosaur (1991, both Four Winds), Principal Stickler thinks following the rules will solve the problem. Some of the tongue-in-cheek sound bites will go right over the heads of younger children, but older ones will enjoy the problem-solving aspect of this story as well as the subtle humor. Alley's chunky, multicultural characters are reminiscent of Marshall and Allard's work with their black-line, watercolor figures. However, the frumpy Mrs. Toggle makes for a more believable, lovable character than Miss Viola Swamp. Another winner in Pulver's vignettes of classroom situations.
Joyce Richards, Prairie Grove Elementary School, AR
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

``Overcome by spring,'' the ever-childlike Mrs. Toggle (Mrs. Toggle's Zipper, etc.) leaves the papers on her desk to join her class in kickball. When she misses the ball, her shoe sails into a tree (where, in Alley's ingenuous watercolors, a pair of birds seriously consider it as a site for a nest). True to form, principal Mr. Stickler turns up to chide the teacher for setting a poor example (``one shoe off and one shoe on'') and suggests some wonderfully silly means of retrieval, like luring it with food, that would be a lot more appropriate to his cat; also true to form, Mr. Abel the custodian eventually gets the shoe down with his ladder. Simple and, by now, predictable; still, disarmingly lighthearted and funny. (Picture book. 4-8) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Ages 4-7. Kids who long to feel superior to adults will delight in this cheery tale that has its tongue firmly in cheek. Overcome by spring, buoyant Mrs. Toggle races off to the playground, where she accidentally sends her new blue shoe flying into a tree. After the ever-helpful kids in Mrs. Toggle's multicultural class fail to retrieve the shoe, they ask the principal for his sage advice. What they get, instead, are the rules Mr. Stickler always follows to get his cat down when she's stuck in a tree ("The next thing I try is foodÿ20.ÿ20.ÿ20.ÿ20Fluffy usually comes down for sardines in olive oil"). The simple text has appealing repetition; the watercolors are bright and breezy, and the silly twist at the end serves up the right dose of schoolyard justice. Julie Corsaro