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First published in Great Britain by Collins in 1951
Published in this ebook edition by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2020
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Text copyright © Noel Streatfeild 1951
Postscript © William Streatfeild 2001
Why You’ll Love This Book © Cathy Cassidy 2008
Inside illustrations © Piers Sanford
Cover illustrations © Sarah Gibb 2020
Cover design copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
All rights reserved.
Noel Streatfeild asserts the moral rights to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work respectively.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780007580460
Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780007380763
Version: 2020-07-09
CONTENTS
Why You’ll Love This Book by Cathy Cassidy
Postscript by William Streatfeild
Why You’ll Love This Book by Cathy Cassidy
When I was growing up, books were an escape, a passport to a whole new world. Nothing very exciting ever seemed to happen to me, but I could open the pages of a book and imagine myself as a ballerina or an ice-skater or a lonely orphan at a strict boarding school… and I loved that! Books seemed like a kind of real-life magic to me, back then.
Ballet Shoes was the first Noel Streatfeild book I read and loved, so when I discovered White Boots, I devoured that too. The story is not just about Harriet learning to skate, but her friendship with rich, spoilt skating star Lalla Moore. It explores the themes of jealousy, loyalty and dependency within a friendship, things I now write about in my own books! Friendship is something that matters to all of us, whatever our age, but it takes hard work and determination to make a friendship strong, as Harriet and Lalla find out.
I loved the ice-skating background of White Boots – as a child I had never been on the ice at all, and that whole world of cute little skating dresses and white boots seemed impossibly cool and glam. I never did get the hang of ice-skating, even as an adult, but I still love to watch those who can and dream of what might have been!
Re-reading White Boots again now, I was fascinated to find it was written in 1951, just 11 years before I was born… yet as a child, the time and setting of the book seemed