Review of What Can You Do With Only One Shoe? by Simon & Sheryl Shapiro

One can, two can. Who can? You can!
Using junk from the landfill site.
Rusty cans and wood and wire,
thrumming, strumming, day and night.

In this inventive new collection of verse, Sheryl and Simon Shapiro introduce readers to 13 everyday objects that have been ingeniously reimagined into something else altogether.

Color photographs of recycled objects are accompanied by lighthearted, jaunty poems in a variety of lengths and rhyming patterns. Kids will love identifying each reinvented item, and will marvel at how a shoe makes a great bird’s nest, how old tin cans make a guitar, or how a car can be transformed into a bed!

Complete with Francis Blake’s lively color illustrations, What Can You Do With Only One Shoe? will delight young readers while introducing the idea of recycling and repurposing in a new and innovative way.

Book Links

Goodreads * Amazon * B&N * IndieBound

(affiliate link included)

**My thoughts**

This book is really cute! It combines poetry, crafts, and just plain silliness that is sure to appeal to kids of all ages. To capture their attention, it does start with a silly poem with some clever puns about repurposing a toilet into a planter. I don't know that I would want such a thing in my garden, but some of the other ideas, such as the shoe as a birdfeeder, may work. 

The poems offer up some silly suggestions for what to do with these found treasures. Those ideas are shown in clever drawings, with the real project being shown in a photograph.

The big problem is, there are no instructions as to how to make any of these fun projects! I do appreciate the inspiration, but now I want to know how to make a couple of them. Yes, some things like the aforementioned toilet planter and shoe birdfeeder are easy enough to figure out. Some of the later designs, though, such as a boat turned into a bench, a real life car as a bed, or a shopping cart chair would definitely be more complicated. A more practical idea is the purse made out of an old pair of jeans. That is something I could see myself making as a gift. My guess is that the authors simply wanted to share some fun ideas upon which they have come across. I just want more!

I gave it 3.5 stars.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for fulfilling my request for a review copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.