TWO SHOES, BLUE SHOES, NEW SHOES!

A new pair of blue Mary Janes does a lot more than put spring in the step of a girl heading off for a day of school in the big city. Her footwear inspires some outlandish flights of fancy. No sooner does the narrator cross a busy street than she imagines herself "Swinging from a rope, shoes,/ With an antelope, shoes!" and even "Dancing on the moon, shoes,/ With a blue baboon, shoes!" Zaman covers every inch of the spreads with bright, boisterous watercolors that bounce right along with Fitz-Gibbon's (The Patchwork House) sing-song rhyme. Her paintings portray the realistic, exciting bustle of urban life (where grownups in short skirts and high heels stop at a coffee cart on the way to work) as adeptly as the gleefully improbable scenarios of the heroine's imagination (hitching a ride with a blue whale in a city park pond). Her artwork often provides transitions to the sometimes disconnected rhyme (as when the antelope leaps across a stream in a park that seems to feed into a pond where the whale frolics). A fun excursion. Ages 4-6. (Apr.)