The Girl, the Bear and the Magic Shoes Award-winning team

A magical adventure about a girl, a bear and some very special shoes from the bestselling creators of What the Ladybird Heard and Sugarlump and the Unicorn. Full of action and imagination, and with a delightfully unexpected ending, this gorgeous book is one to enjoy over and over again.

When Josephine leaves the shoe shop after buying some new running shoes, she hears an unusual sound – Click-click! Click-click! It’s a bear with a backpack! Luckily for Josephine, her new shoes are anything but ordinary – these are magic shoes. But can they help her escape the bear when there’s a mountain, a bog and even a lake in her way?

The Girl, the Bear and the Magic Shoes is an exciting adventure from the stellar picture-book partnership of Julia Donaldson and Lydia Monks. Enjoy more of their stories with Sharing a Shell, The Singing Mermaid, and The Rhyming Rabbit.

Product Details

Format

Paperback

ISBN

9781447275985

Publisher

Macmillan Children's Books

Date published

April 4th, 2019

Lexile measure

AD500L Lexiles are the global standard in reading assessment. They are unique as they are able to measure a child and a book on the same scale – ensuring the right book gets to the right child at the right time.

For more details see What is a lexile?.

Accelerated Reader

AR book level: 2.7; Lower years; 0.5 points

Other details

32 pages

Condition

New

Author/Illustrator

Julia Donaldson

Julia Donaldson is author of many of today’s best-loved picture books including The Gruffalo and Stick Man. Best known for her collaborations with Axel Scheffler, each of these vivid rhyming stories is a triumph of imagination. She was also the Children’s Laureate 2011-2013.

More about Julia: “I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him).

Mary and I were always creating imaginary characters and mimicking real ones, and I used to write shows and choreograph ballets for us.

I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married.

Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta.

The busking led to a career in singing and songwriting, mainly for children’s television.

One of my television songs, A Squash and a Squeeze, was made into a book in 1993, with illustrations by the wonderful Axel Scheffler. It was great to hold the book in my hand without it vanishing in the air the way the songs did. This prompted me to unearth some plays I’d written for a school reading group, and since then I’ve had 20 plays published.

My real breakthrough was The Gruffalo, again illustrated by Axel. We work separately – he’s in London and I’m in Glasgow – but he sends me letters with lovely funny pictures on the envelopes.

My novel The Giants and the Joneses is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic Princess Mirror-Belle who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old.

When I’m not writing I am often performing, at book festivals and in theatres. I really enjoy getting the children in the audience to help me act out the stories and sing the songs.”