GYPSY GIRL'S BEST SHOES

Maggi's gypsy family moved into a store front and found there a pair of red shoes which just happened to be the right size for Maggi. She wanted to dance in them, but when she tried to drum up an audience, everybody,--her mother, the fireman, the baker, the florist,--turned out to be busy. So she went to the park to dance for herself, and when she stopped found a classroom full of entranced spectators. The author/illustrator's pictures are in the same bright precise style she used for Paul and Arthur Search for the Egg (1964) with blank-faced, boneless, cartoonish people and carefully drawn details. Here, the detailing shows up the many aspects of a neighborhood on New York's lower East Side, which, in both story and pictures, seems to have been freshly laundered. A good introduction to the functioning of a segment of a big city for the very young.