Ever since she was a little girl, Marguerite de Angeli has loved her father's descriptions of the red leather-topped copper-toed boots he prized more than sixty years ago when he was a little boy in Northern Michigan. She treasured also his tale of "tradin" at the store and with his schoolmates, of a mischievous and never-to-be-forgotten episode of a calf in the school house belfry, of carrying water for the elephants on circus day, of picnicking during blackberry time—indeed all the friendly, folk happenings of a little American town in the seventies.

And finally—almost as though the copper-toed boots had led the way, the story of Shad and his particular friends, Ash Tomlinson and the little dog, Sammy, and their good times and mishaps through a Michigan summer just had to be written so that boys and girls of today could share it.

Partly because Lapeer and its people are part of her own background, and partly because of her sure instinct for absorbing and recreating the feeling of family and community life, past or present, Marguerite de Angeli has given us in COPPER-TOED BOOTS one of her most lovely and realistic American picture books.

From the dust jacket