Review of How to Tie a Shoe & Other Big Adventures by Skip Hill

Every kid knows that tying a shoe can be a big adventure, especially in a world full of spaghetti, birds’ nests, camping trips, and seeing old friends after summer break.

How to Tie a Shoe & Other Big Adventures is the first in a series of handbooks by Penny Candy Books exploring and unraveling the complexities of some of childhood’s most essential lessons where tying a shoe becomes a metaphor for experience, and learning is an act of discovery.

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**My thoughts**

The black and white drawings are fun and interesting. And I love the messages of friendship in the last half of the book. Those pictures are pretty special.

I'm not a huge fan of the hand drawn text, though, because it is not as easy to read. It reminds me of the way I used to draw letters when I was in elementary school and sometimes feels like it is detracting from the pictures. In some pictures, the text blended in way too much with the illustrations.

The story is a fun adventure and full of imagination, and I am sure that a lot of kids will relate to how one thing can make you think of something else, in a kind of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie kind of a way. But it seriously has nothing to do with learning how to tie your shoes. And I think a lot of people are going to get this book, thinking it is actually a primer on tying shoes, and will be disappointed when it is not.

Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for providing me with a requested review copy of this story. All thoughts and opinions are my own.