How does Ursula Dubosarsky explore ideas about fear in The Red Shoe?
Ursula Dubosarsky book "The Red Shoe” is creative, fascinating and keeps you on the edge of your seat. This has been done by creating a mysterious fear, for each individual character and carefully unravelling the main cause, which links everything together, near the end. I believe the core of this book is the fear and secrecy of each character from each other and the one incident at the Basin that this book revolves around. The concept of fear differs from character to character, for instance Matilda’s fear results in Floreal being created. There is fine line in knowing things and understanding and reacting to things that may be outside you comfort zone.
The quote ‘It’s only knows things that make you afraid’, said by Elizabeth, affects Matilda the most. Matilda is a sneaky little girl and is known to know the most of secrets. She attempts to keep all the secrets she knows private, “like a spy”. She is also unable to about the sight she wasn’t supposed to see at the Basin, to anyone because of the fragile state everyone is in. Her fear causes her to create an imaginary friend, Floreal 22, which carries her doubts and negative outlooks on everything. He is very arrogant and stubborn and like to contradict everything Matilda says; “ ‘my father’s brave… He was it the war’ “, but then Floreal retorts “ ’The war is over now…he’s not brave, anyway’”. Part of her wants her to forget because she wasn’t supposed to see, nor does she know how to react to this incident “ ‘but I don’t want to remember’ ” .Her fear has the most impact on her because of her age and the way she sees everything and mainly because she doesn’t understand. Since she is just six of age she has the wildest imagination ”the Cowboys and the Red Indians”. Having such imagination, you cannot imagine what Matilda would be thinking about, when her father has a rope tied around his neck, but