By Stephanie L. Robertson
It’s been a long time since I stayed up until 1 o’clock reading a book, but Donna VanLiere’s The Christmas Shoes kept me curled up on my comfy sofa, reading the whole book in one sitting.
Granted, it’s a quick read with just over 129 pages, but it’s a good read that’s based on The Christmas Shoes by Eddie Carswell and Leonard Ahlstrom of NewSong.
You may have heard the song on the radio around Christmastime. I really liked VanLiere’s adaptation of the song—how she fleshes out the characters into life-and-blood people with real lives and struggles.
The book is about a hard-nosed lawyer who works 80 hours a week to the detriment of his family. It’s also about an eight-year-old boy who is trying to cope with his mother’s terminal illness.
The lawyer (Robert) and the boy (Nathan) live on different sides of the tracks, but Robert’s life is complicated. He and his wife are miserable and plan on splitting up their family. Nathan’s life is complicated. Though poor, he has a happy home. His family is to be separated, too, because of no fault of their own: his mother’s cancer.
The two families’ parallel stories have this common thread throughout the book. At times the families interact, but only incidentally—until midway through the book when Robert and Nathan’s lives collide.
Nathan enters a department store where Robert is haphazardly buying last-minute Christmas presents for his family. Nathan reaches the cashier first. He lays a pair of sparkling ladies’ shoes on the counter and fishes out $4.60. Not nearly enough to buy the shoes.
Robert is annoyed at the spectacle, but what follows changes his life and perspective forever.
Pros: The Christmas Shoes is a good read. Not sappy or simplistic like many Christmas novels, VanLiere’s book is comprised of true-to-life characters with real-world problems. The dialog is believable and even her secondary characters are well-developed. I’ll definitely be searching the library for more books by this author.
Cons: The book kept me up until 1 AM! Well past my bedtime. 🙂
I highly recommend The Christmas Shoes this holiday season. It’s enough to turn the sternest Scrooge into a happy Santa. Merry Christmas, y’all!
The Christmas Shoes
Sometimes, the things that can change your life will cross your path in one instant-and then, in a fleeting moment, they’re gone. But if you open your eyes, and watch carefully, you will believe…
Robert is a successful attorney who has everything in life-and nothing at all. Focused on professional achievement and material rewards, Robert is on the brink of losing his marriage. He has lost sight of his wife, Kate, their two daughters, and ultimately himself. Eight-year-old Nathan has a beloved mother, Maggie, whom he is losing to cancer. But Nathan and his family are building a simple yet full life, and struggling to hold onto every moment they have together. A chance meeting on Christmas Even brings Robert and Nathan together-he is shopping for a family he hardly knows and Nathan is shopping for a mother he is soon to lose. In this one encounter, their lives are forever altered as Robert learns an important lesson: sometimes the smallest things can make all the difference. The Christmas Shoes is a universal story of the deeper meaning of serendipity, a tale of our shared humanity, and of how a power greater than ourselves can shape, and even save, our lives.
