Donna Gephart In Your Shoes Sparknotes

Imagine going through a phase, when the pace of life comes to a crawl; it feels so lonely, and everything seems so unfair…doesn’t it feel like someone is doing this as intended torture? This feeling of despair is exactly what the main characters, Amy and Miles, experience. In Your Shoes is a realistic fiction book written by Donna Gephart. Amy and Miles are the protagonists, and both are hit with the tragedies of losing a loved one, a void of sorrow one can never come out of. Amy lost her mom to cancer, and moves to a small town, Buckington, Pennsylvania, with her dad. Amy hates it here. For starters, it’s impossible to make friends and she has to live in a funeral home as if there’s no way to escape from what happened to her mom. She doesn’t

But when Miles’ airborne shoe comes to hit her right at her forehead, things begin changing in a way one would never expect. Donna Gephart displays the profound themes of the circle of life, companionship as salvation, and the idea of inner versus outer strength in her book In Your Shoes, filled with literary devices such as imagery and plot.

The circle of life is the idea that life and death are embedded in a cycle, and this novel touches on the heartfelt lessons of accepting the loss of a loved one, as well as the steps that follow. Readers visualize Amy reminiscing memories with her deceased mom, through the use of Gephart’s imagery. In times of desperate need, Amy tells the readers she often turns to her mother above for guidance, and supposedly, her mom answers back. However, this means it’s harder for Amy to accept her disappearance. Gephart writes, “Amy remembered her mom in the blue uniform she wore when she delivered mail. She remembered the uniform hanging in her mom’s closet when her mom had gotten too sick to keep working. And she remembered the uniform folded and placed in a box of clothing her dad gave away before they moved.” (Gephart 110). This excerpt is an example of

To begin with, imagery illustrates a story in the reader’s mind. Amy is a very vivid writer, and throughout the novel, she has her own supporting story which correlates to the events happening to her in real life. In her story, the main character, Fiona, is about to escape her captivity from a prince in his tallest tower. Amy sits on her bed and writes the following, “Fiona forced herself to wait twenty slow breaths before pulling the stone away and taking out the hair rope…She took a deep breath for bravery. ‘We can do this!’’ (Gephart 293). Gephart applies imagery throughout phrases such as “twenty slow breaths.” This triggers the reader's sense of hearing, and it’s almost as if one can hear the fear in her voice through the text. The author uses imagery to fully alert the reader to how intense the situation is, and emphasizes the need for strength to be at Fiona’s hand. Although Fiona is not a primary character in the novel, one can see the internal strength she possesses. When one thinks of strength, one’s likely to imagine muscles or physical strength. But the greatest form of strength is the willpower of the mind, convincing one’s self that something is possible, when all the odds seem to be stacked, which is exactly the situation in Amy’s fantasy story. Similarly, the plot is used