Madeline Sharples

PaPa’s Shoes is an engaging and well-written novel loosely based on the true story of the author’s grandparents, Isidore, a shoemaker and his wife Mrytle Tasky, who left a tiny shtetl in Poland in the early 1900s to come to America in pursuit of a better life for their family.

The story provides an intimate view of the hardships, poverty and discrimination faced by the immigrants who built our country through their true grit and hard labor, a relevant topic in today’s current political climate.

It is a deeply layered story of love, betrayal, grief, cultural and generational conflict both within families and with the outside world.

The story moves along at a steady pace and is rich in detail about the environment, the political climate and the Jewish culture. The author skillfully uses Jewish terms both in dialogue and in sensory descriptions which provides an authentic cultural immersion experience for the reader. She provides a glossary at the end of the book as a guide to the reader.; The characters are believable and come alive on the page so that we understand the devastating grief of a mother who loses three young sons to a common illness, the frustration of a husband whose wife’s all-consuming grief drives him away and the conflict when a daughter falls in love with a man from a different faith. The drama, suspense and conflict had this reader turning the pages and looking forward to getting back to the story.

I highly recommend this compelling immigration tale.… (mehr)