One shoe two shoes by Caryl Hart, illustrated by Edward Underwood

The author/illustrator duo of Big box little box returns with another toddler and storytime-friendly rhyming story.

An enthusiastic brown dog with a black saddle rejoices in the many, many shoes she encounters. After exuberant rhymes celebrating the many different kinds of shoes, the dog sees something hiding in one of the shoes. Mice! For them, the shoes are houses and now, having counted all the shoes, readers can count the growing numbers of little white mice in those shoes. Finally, the dog fetches shoes for her owner and the mice zip away on a pair of colorful roller skates.

This doesn't really have a plot, but it's a fun rhyming story to chant with toddlers at a shoe or mice-themed storytime. Underwood's blocky art leaves a white border around the pages with sharply defined shapes - circles for the wheels of the roller skates, decorations of stars, flowers, and polka dots on the shoes, and ashy gray shadows on the white pages.

Verdict: A nice addition to storytime collections. Recommended.

ISBN: 9781547600946; Published July 2019 by Bloomsbury; Borrowed from another library in my consortium; Purchased for the library