["Circus Shoes"] will entertain the family. Noel Streatfeild began as a writer of fiction for adults; the success of her first story for children, "Ballet Shoes," was in some measure due to her use of the same adult technique, while keeping inside the range of ten-year-old interests and experience. "Circus Shoes" is a thumping good circus story; it follows a real, easily identifiable circus through its complete routine winter and summer…. I did not wonder that the book received in England the medal corresponding to the Newbery Award [the Carnegie Medal]….

[The] book shows [the two children's] education by trial and error and transformation from potential snobs to honest workers, from butter-fingered amateurs to solid professionals. Not professional circus people; just the kind of people they would have been if they had had, at home, the chance that honest life of Cob's Circus gave.

So you have a...