Book Review: “Blue Shoe” by Anne Lamott
A Short Review/Annotation of Blue Shoe by Anne Lamott
The only other book I’ve read by Anne Lamott was Bird by Bird, which is wonderful, but I had no idea how powerful, thought-provoking, and wonderful her fiction writing was.
Blue Shoe is filled with exquisite descriptive imagery, interesting characters, and a knack for making ordinary and dull things beautiful and full of life. I noticed this first in her scene openings. Throughout the book, the narrator has a very close relationship with nature; every scene plays out in tandem with the season or time of year.
As Mattie, the main character, goes through her normal and not-so-normal life, she pays close attention to how the seasons affect her emotional and mental states, and vice versa—how her emotional and mental states influence how she perceives the weather around her, the nature of the park and her backyard, even the many animals in her home.
I’ve never been a very good nature writer. I falter for the words to describe trees and leaves and the wind and the sky, especially if I venture beyond the words tree, leaf, wind, and sky. But Lamott’s vocabulary seems endless.
A few of the phrases I loved most are “The word outside the window was in flames” and “Leaves fluttered, nervous and playful, gold, green.”
The first phrase actually opens her book, and I was immediately hooked. I heard someone say once that a book is only as good as it’s first line; I almost completely agree. The second sentence reveals the story begins in fall and she is describing the color of the trees, but the shock and subsequent relief are wonderful indicators of what is to come—that in many ways Mattie’s world was in flames and thus, her story begins. The latter sentence is just one example of the many ways Lamott brings to life life itself, personifying the leaves in intimate ways like “nervous” and “playful,” while reminding us they are still leaves with “gold” and “green.” Her personification remains purely descriptive.
She also uses word play to her advantage in her descriptions of nature: “As hard as they tried to settle into summer, new stresses sprang up…” She uses the verb “sprang” in a brilliant way, mimicking the ways of spring and contrasting summer as something you “settle” into.
Throughout her writing but especially in her descriptions, she makes good use of varying sentence length. Sometimes a sentence will have lots of commas and prepositions, like when she writes, “Sitting there, on her haunches, on top of a toilet seat in a most cramped space, clutching her knees to her chest, hiding her face behind a curtain of bangs, was Abby Grann.”
In the story, this could be considered the climax. Though I won’t give too much away, Mattie has been searching for Abby Grann throughout the book and now, she’s finally found her.
Though the reader knows this is coming, Lamott still makes you wait for it, savoring the description with her string of clauses. I imagined a director allowing the camera to pan around the room and over a body until bam, we see her face and realize it’s Abby! The sentence is a wonderful master class in controlled suspense.
Her descriptions for people are wonderful as well; she writes later, “Abby was like an ostrich; if she just sat there long enough, maybe Mattie would go away.” The way she structures her sentences, leaving the perfect amount of room for the punch, kept me interested as a reader but also as a writer. I admire the way she brings words further to life by placing them together so perfectly. I want to practice my attention to detail in this way in my own writing by sitting with scenes longer, allowing my imagination to flesh it all out as I put it to the page.
Overall, I definitely recommend this book for fellow writers especially. Lamott is one of the best out there and this book in particular gave me plenty of ideas for stretching myself in the description department, sentence structure and adjective use alike.
