One of the few progressive Christian writers with a national voice, Anne Lamott's work (Bird by Bird, Operating Instructions) ranges from the meditative to the hilarious. Blue Shoe falls somewhere in the middle of that range. A slow, thoughtful novel, rooted in the domestic routines of child-raising, Blue Shoe follows the newly separated Mattie Ryder as she moves back into her childhood home, recently vacated by her elderly mother, and undertakes the renovation of her entire life. Her best friend Angela has left the San Francisco Bay area to move in with her new lover, Julie. Mattie's ex-husband, Nicky, has settled so quickly into a steady relationship with a young woman named Lee that it is clear they were involved during his marriage to Mattie. Nicky and Mattie's two children are displaying signs of emotional disturbance (Lamott is at her best in describing the quietly weird behavior of young children). And to add to the mix, Mattie's mother is falling into a senile dementia characterized by pleading phone calls and wacky assertions of independence. All Mattie wants is a little more money, a decent boyfriend, and for her philandering father to rise from his grave and solve all her problems. Is that so much to ask? Some of the action in this novel could have been compressed, and the major subplot involving Mattie's father fails to excite, but the strengths of Blue Shoe--humor, unflinching characterization, and keen observation--more than compensate for its weaknesses. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly
Memoirist and novelist Lamott (Operating Instructions; Crooked Little Heart, etc.) brilliantly captures the dilemma of a divorced woman from the so-called "sandwich generation" in her latest, a funny, poignant and occasionally gut-wrenching novel that tracks the efforts of Mattie Ryder to cope with her divorce, find a new man, deal with her mother's aging and restore the emotional equilibrium of her two young children. The divorce dominates in the early going as Mattie continues to sleep with her sexy but egotistical ex-husband, Nick, even though his new romance with a younger woman is clipping along at a sprightly pace. Meanwhile, Mattie grows close to a married friend named Daniel, who also feels a romantic pull although he's happily married. Mattie's feisty mother, Isa, ages precipitously and becomes increasingly disoriented, leading to a series of calamities. Mattie's touching relationships with her kids, two-year-old Ella and difficult but sensitive six-year-old Harry, become the emotional anchor for the novel, and narrative momentum is provided by the gradual unfolding of a family secret, which reveals the infidelities of Mattie's late father. Most of the comedy is of the domestic variety, and Lamott continually displays her gift for finding the right combination of humor and small but significant revelations in ordinary moments. The ensemble cast is another major strength of the book, providing a backdrop against which Mattie, Daniel, Isa and the children emerge as powerful and memorable individuals. Lamott has explored similar terrain in her earlier works, but the scope and freshness of this novel could make it a breakout work for her.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Lamott's use of language allows us to see the smallest details from a fresh perspective, and her stories of motherhood and faith never fail to entertain and move us, all within the tightly wound ball of a good literary yarn. Her seventh novel (after Crooked Little Heart) stars Mattie Ryder, the mother of two, who's left her wandering husband and moved into the ramshackle house of her difficult mother. Mattie has a lot of things to figure out. After serendipitously coming across some old trinkets that belonged to her dead father (including a little blue rubber shoe from a gumball machine), Mattie is drawn into the past to discover the truth about her dad. At the same time, her demanding mother is failing and probably needs to go into a nursing home. And when the house is overrun by rats, the pest-control people send Daniel, who has a ponytail and "closely set brown eyes that made him look like an incompetent bird of prey." What turns into friendship could, for Mattie, be love. Lamott uses offbeat, descriptive language (e.g., vibrational and snorfled), and her story is as good as her funky turn of a phrase. For most popular fiction collections.Beth Gibbs, Davidson, NCCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
In her narration of BLUE SHOE, Laural Merlington has found the essence of each character and offers it forth as a blending of her understanding and the author's meaning. The segments of the story are tied together by bright melodies played on strings and piano, firmly creating an ambiance of family life. Mattie Ryder is weighed down by a recent divorce, two small children, an unfinished house that smells of cat urine, and the desire to discover her family's personal history. Her projects and her findings, coupled with a well-directed production, result in a very listenable story. J.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
In a convoluted story filled with improbable plotlines and impossible circumstances, the chance discovery of a tiny blue plastic shoe, a child's prize from a gumball machine, leads to the unraveling of a long-buried family mystery and reveals the equally mysterious workings of faith, family, and friendship. Lamott returns to her favorite themes in her portrayal of Mattie Ryder, a harried single mother blessed with two precocious children, stressed by a feisty but frail mother, involved with a married man, and burdened with the legacy of her deceased father's adulterous life. Anxiety and infidelity, rejection and betrayal--substantial subjects all, and ones that Lamott treats with boundless grace and compassion but with precious little of the luminous lyricism or wry wisdom for which she is known and loved. When she's at the top of her game, Lamott stands dreadlocked-head and shoulders above the competition, with her slightly skewed observations that still somehow manage to hit their mark with pinpoint accuracy and her trademark "Oh, God, I wish I'd said that" one-liners. But readers who have eagerly anticipated a new Lamott novel may be disappointed, and those wishing to try Lamott for the first time would do well to start with her earlier works because, sadly, her latest offers only occasional glimpses of her usual brilliance. In her last regular Salon column, Lamott signed off by explaining that God told her it was time to write a new novel; one can't help but wish they'd had a slightly longer conversation. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Mattie Ryder is marvelously neurotic, well-intentioned, funny, religious, sarcastic, tender, angry, and broke. And her life at the moment is a wreck: her marriage has failed, her mother is failing, her house is rotting, her waist is expanding (and she's a perfect size 12 model at Sears), she has a crush on a married man, and her two young children are behaving the way young children in the midst of a divorce behave. Then she comes upon a small rubber blue shoe - the kind you might get from a gum ball machine - and a few other trifles that were left years ago in her deceased father's car. They hold the clues to her messy upbringing, and as Mattie and her brother follow these clues to uncover the secrets of their past, she begins to open her heart to her difficult, brittle mother and to the father she only thought she knew.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Memoirist and novelist Lamott (Operating Instructions; Crooked Little Heart, etc.) brilliantly captures the dilemma of a divorced woman from the so-called "sandwich generation" in her latest, a funny, poignant and occasionally gut-wrenching novel that tracks the efforts of Mattie Ryder to cope with her divorce, find a new man, deal with her mother's aging and restore the emotional equilibrium of her two young children. The divorce dominates in the early going as Mattie continues to sleep with her sexy but egotistical ex-husband, Nick, even though his new romance with a younger woman is clipping along at a sprightly pace. Meanwhile, Mattie grows close to a married friend named Daniel, who also feels a romantic pull although he's happily married. Mattie's feisty mother, Isa, ages precipitously and becomes increasingly disoriented, leading to a series of calamities. Mattie's touching relationships with her kids, two-year-old Ella and difficult but sensitive six-year-old Harry, become the emotional anchor for the novel, and narrative momentum is provided by the gradual unfolding of a family secret, which reveals the infidelities of Mattie's late father. Most of the comedy is of the domestic variety, and Lamott continually displays her gift for finding the right combination of humor and small but significant revelations in ordinary moments. The ensemble cast is another major strength of the book, providing a backdrop against which Mattie, Daniel, Isa and the children emerge as powerful and memorable individuals. Lamott has explored similar terrain in her earlier works, but the scope and freshness of this novel could make it a breakout work for her. Agents, Sarah Chalfant and Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency. (Oct.) Forecast: Lamott is better known as a bestselling writer of memoirs and nonfiction than as a novelist, but Blue Shoe-a featured selection of the Doubleday Book Club and BOMC, and an alternate selection of the Literary Guild-is poised to even the score. The writer's many devoted fans are sure to pack her readings on a 10-city author tour. Audio rights to Brilliance Audio; foreign rights sold in Germany and Greece. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Lamott's fans will not be disappointed with this new novel, her sixth. Her heroine, Mattie Ryder, has problems-nothing earthshaking, just the painful kind that nibble at her self-esteem. She has left her philandering husband and moved into her mother's ramshackle house; her strong, save-the-world mother is slipping into dementia; her daughter chews on her fingers; her son refuses to do homework; and she is attracted to a married man. In addition, she discovers that she has a half-brother, the result of a union between her late father and the daughter of a family friend. Mattie manages these disturbances in part by being brave and by asking, "What would Jesus do?" Lamott (Operating Instructions) excels in her quirky descriptions, such as Mattie's five-year-old daughter looking like a "secretarial kitten gone punk" or someone's mouth having "scrabble-tile" teeth. While the plot meanders occasionally into implausibility, her humorous yet poignant characters will keep listeners interested. Laural Merlington reads convincingly although problems with the tape quality of the review copy occasionally obscured her voice. Recommended for most popular fiction collections.-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

AudioFile

In her narration of Blue Shoe, Laural Merlington has found the essence of each character and offers it forth as a blending of her understanding and the author's meaning. The segments of the story are tied together by bright melodies played on strings and piano, firmly creating an ambiance of family life. Mattie Ryder is weighed down by a recent divorce, two small children, an unfinished house that smells of cat urine, and the desire to discover her family's personal history. Her projects and her findings, coupled with a well-directed production, result in a very listenable story. J.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

Lamott infuses this peripatetic story of a woman￯﾿ﾽs struggles after a divorce with the same quirky brand of Christianity she explored in her wildly popular memoir, Traveling Mercies (1999).

When Mattie finally accepts that her marriage to the charming but unfaithful Nicholas is over, she moves her two children, Harry (six) and Ella (two), back into the house where she grew up because it￯﾿ﾽs free: conveniently, her mother, still intimidatingly energetic and competent at 72, has paid off the mortgage and decamped to an apartment. Over the next four years, Mattie goes through all the familiar rites of divorce: anger, longing, desperation, slow recovery to strength, and new love. Her children bring her solace even as they drive her crazy (Lamott is the master of domestic detail): Ella￯﾿ﾽs nail-chewing, Harry￯﾿ﾽs bouts of temper, as well as moments of tenderness are rendered with casual perfection. The description of the failed marriage itself, however, is generic, and Mattie￯﾿ﾽs sense of blamelessness in its collapse sets up a self-righteous tone not masked by self-deprecating humor, a Lamott trademark. Mattie prays her way out of bad feelings, and her religion weaves its way throughout, helping her cope as complications arise￯﾿ﾽwhich they do. She sleeps with her ex even after his girlfriend moves in and has a baby. She finds clues that her lovable father, a lawyer and liberal activist who died 20 years earlier, had a dark side. Her mother￯﾿ﾽs mind and body begin a slow, painful slide into senescence. Mattie￯﾿ﾽs dog dies. And then there is Daniel. We know he￯﾿ﾽll become Mattie￯﾿ﾽs soulmate when he can￯﾿ﾽt bring himself to kill the rats he￯﾿ﾽs been hired to eradicate from Mattie￯﾿ﾽs infested house. While Danielresists her attraction because he￯﾿ﾽs married, she takes him to her church (his wife is a nonbeliever), and they become best friends to a degree that would threaten the most secure spouse.