Blue Shoe

by Anne Lamott

Book Overview

TERRIFIC OVER SIZED SOFT COVER! COULD EASILY LIST AS NEW! NEARLY FLAWLESS SHAPE! VERY MINOR COVER EDGE WEAR! SHIPS SAME DAY WITH TRACKING NUMBER! bkmtshf This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573222267
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Length: 291 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.1" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

If you like Anne Lamott's style, you'll LOVE this book

It wanders, it digresses, it circles around and sneaks up on you from behind. It beguiles, it teases, and it delivers. Mattie's life is a mess, her love affairs are a mess, her mother is a mess . . . and aren't we all in some kind of mess? What I especially loved about Blue Shoe is that there's a little mystery thread running through all the messiness that somehow manages to connect everything in a very tidy way that's not typical of Lamott's writing. Very clever and simple, at the same time.Read it.

Messy, Likeable, and Totally Anne!

I think I'm in love. Shhh, don't tell anyone.Ever since discovering "Traveling Mercies," I've been an ardent Anne-Fan. That said, I admit that her fiction has often read like thinly disguised nonfiction. She recycles so many of her own experiences through her stories that it's hard not to imagine Anne as the protagonist of every novel she writes. Sure, I enjoy her honesty, but I also want to escape into something new."Blue Shoe" is something new. No doubt, we Anne-Fans see her shiny little face beaming/scowling/smirking/lusting through the pages of this book; however, Mattie, our recently divorced hero, is very much her own person. The story follows her attempts to reconcile life with God, her ex, her kids, her mom...oh, and the Evergreen man. Daniel doesn't want to be an Evergreen man. Mattie wants him to be her man. Daniel is married. And Mattie's still sleeping with her ex when he calls.These elements, linked with the startling similes and heartbreaking candor of Anne's prose, add up to her best fiction yet. She deals with so many elements of betrayal and loss, love and hurt. Anne's been there, and she knows how to take us there with her. She meanders, she lets her characters stumble through life, she expects us to follow along. If you have the ability to empathize with others, it's hard not to care about someone in this story. Anyone. Choose a character. They all have their faults; they all have redeeming qualities.I like truthfulness. I like a pimple on a beautiful face. I like to know that we are not all slaves to the picture perfect world our media tries to sell.Thanks, Anne, for smiling and writing through the pain. I'm still in love. With this great new book, others are lining up behind me.

blue, who?

Revealing the American family she stands alone but among the very good company of Updike and Tyler. She conveys pain and longing, exhilaration and acceptance like no one else. It flows from the page to the brain to the heart to the funny bone. Her writing is like breathing. It's authentic with hardly a misstep. With all her neuroses, I think I love her.

Annie's done it again, only better...

I have been a big fan of Anne Lamott since "Hard Laughter" was published more than twenty years ago, and own all of her books. It is an intoxicating joy to watch such a gifted writer continue to just get better and better. "Blue Shoe" touches with such a sure hand on every kind of human issue: including being a parent, being a child, being an adult who craves love even when it isn't good for you, wanting to deconstruct childhood secrets, and handling the mixed blessing of getting answers to questions that you thought that you wanted to resolve.If you already know Anne's work, go for it. If she's new to you, go for it. You'll be, I hope, glad, stunned, a little breathless at the book's gratifying conclusion.

Lamott Enchants Again

I waited with great anticipation for this new book of Lamott's and was not disappointed, finding it both enchanting and full of her particular brand of wisdom. I thought her Salon essays and "Traveling Mercies" were brilliant and found much of their material incorporated in this novel. The book is about the "mystery of family and the possibility of love" and contains Lamott's own particular brand of philosophizing. When I finished, I felt like I had been talking with a friend about all the family concerns facing women in today's world.Lamott makes the reader see the world in a different way and feel more at peace with where we happen to be. She expands and expounds, with humor, tenderness, and love, on the smallest incidents and finds new meaning in them. She finds lessons everywhere and deals with life with bold honesty and down-to-earth spirituality. For example: "When God is going to do something wonderful, it starts with something hard, and when God is going to do something exquisite, She starts with an impossibility.""Blue Shoe" gives us several years in 37-year-old Mattie Ryder's disorderly life, a life that is typical of those about whom Lamott writes. Once again, the setting is on the coast of Marin County, where the author herself lives. Mattie is newly divorced at the beginning, coping with all the traumas associated with still wanting her unfaithful ex-husband, moving back to her childhood home, and trying to keep body and soul together. During these years, Mattie finds new loves, deals with her mother's increasing confusion, and raises her young son and daughter with love and laughter. All the oddball characters, also typical of Lamott, somehow gracefully fit into this story and help Mattie cope, along with a strong reliance on God.The little blue shoe is the catalyst which leads Mattie and her brother to find out more than they really want to know about their family, whose past has been glossed over by their mother. The tangled skeins of their parents marriage are slowly revealed. Mattie carries the blue shoe as a kind of good- luck charm, which gives her comfort as some difficult truths come to light.Mattie seems to float along rather than confronting her problems head on, yet somehow, for her, this approach works and keeps her from sinking into depression as she accepts life as it is rather than fighting it. Mattie says "It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable." This is a re-phrasing of the AA prayer with which the author is very familiar, I am sure. She has never hidden her addictions nor her continuing recovery. I think that this is a lesson that would allow many of us to be less stressed - trying to change what cannot be changed is a sure way to create stress in one's life!Lamott's writing shines and her spiritual reflection is given full rein when she writes about Mattie's everyday worries: caring for an aging mother; attempting to get a young