A pair of shoes is the constant among stories across decades in a novel that begins in Berlin in 1938. Dayla, the daughter of a Jewish cobbler, has made a pair of pale pink, embroidered shoes to wear when she eventually weds. In 2013, Ray and Pinney are runaways from a group home in Texas. Pinney, whose full name is Chopine, loves shoes. She wants to go to New York because she’s seen a picture of a tree full of lost shoes there. On it is the pair she’s sure her mother was wearing before her mother got lost. Ray is running away from embarrassment and hopelessness. She doesn’t want Pinney along, but Pinney has a way of attaching herself. On the trip, Pinney, who has Down syndrome, has brought along the pair of graying pale pink embroidered shoes that Ray stole from a thrift store and cast off in hurt and anger the night before they left. How the shoes got from then to now and there to here, what happened to Dayla, what happened to Ray and Pinney before they ever met, and what happens to them next are all revealed in this intricate, emotionally generous novel that invites readers to believe in a little of what Pinney thinks of as magic. (Age 13 and older)

From Nazi Germany to a modern-day orphanage in the American South, three girls separated by decades and thousands of miles are about to give up when a single pair of shoes binds them all together.
 
Dalya is the daughter of a cobbler in 1930s Berlin, and though she is only fifteen, she knows she will follow in her father’s footsteps. When she is forced into a concentration camp one violent November night, she must leave behind everything she knew and loved.
 
Ray is a modern-day orphan, jagged around the edges in every possible way. She sees an impulsive escape to New York as her only chance at happiness; there, she knows she’ll be able to convert her sorrows into songs.
 
Pinny is an unwavering optimist and Ray’s unintended travel companion on her passage to a new life. She inherited from her eccentric mother a fascination with shoes as a means of transformation and expression.
 
A single pair of shoes entwines these lives. How these women connect across different times and places is an unforgettable story of strength, love, bravery, memory, and the serendipity that binds us all together.