I will admit right now that I picked up this book because I am addicted to shoes. Hated them until I spent 4 years of my life working in a shoe store. It will change a person. No joke. So between my obsession with shoes and the cute cover on this book, I couldn’t walk out of the store with this book.

I have to say that I was rather disappointed. It got off to a really good start – it was funny as well as informative, but as the book went on it got drier and drier and drier. It picked up again at the Epilogue, but by then I just wanted to be finished with the book.

Not that it was all bad. Like I have already said, it was very informative. Jacobbi tells the history of shoes, why certain shoes are called by certain names, who made what famous, as well as why they are still around today. It brings in bits of pop culture and relates it to shoes – for example, Jacobbi talks about how Sex & The City made the name Manolo Blahniks such a well known name to the average woman.

Another good thing about this was the illustrations, done by Sara Not. They were utterly adorable.

And it does give good insights as to why women love having a different pair of shoes for every outfit:

As adults, we ask shoes to be our representatives in the world. The beauty of this is that they needn’t define us permanently. At any given point in our lives, and even at different times in a single day, shoes are indicators of our age, mood, desires. Shoes say everything about a woman.

So, in those respects it was a good book. But boy, am I glad this was as short as it was (125 pages, if you include the glossary), because it was just so dry for the majority of the book.