Blueberry Shoe

A baby's lost shoe occasions a simple story about the cycle of life. Baby loses his red tennis shoe during a blueberry-picking expedition on Ptarmigan Mountain with his family. A search turns up nothing, and the family consigns the shoe to the wilderness. But the shoe is not really lost, at least not to the vole that makes a nest in it or a voracious foraging bear that unknowingly turns the shoe into a planter for a blueberry seed. The following summer, the family returns to the mountain, and Baby, now a toddler, discovers his sprouting shoe and proudly takes it home. ""And the next year,"" concludes Dixon (The Sleeping Lady), in singsong prose typeset on the page like blank verse, ""he was the first to pick a single ripe berry, a very sweet ripe berry, from his beautiful blueberry shoe."" Zerbetz's (Lucky Hares and Itchy Bears) linocuts in soft blues and raspberry colors play off of the gentle tone of the text, which is superimposed over a patterned background of leaves and flowers. As comforting as a serving of warm blueberry cobbler. Ages 3-up. (Sept.)