The Lollipop Shoes

The Lollipop Shoes is a 2007 novel by Joanne Harris, written as a sequel to Chocolat, her best-selling book. It shares its characters and setting with that earlier novel, but its tone is darker and more openly mystical. The story unfolds between Halloween and Christmas in Montmartre, Paris, where Vianne Rocher and her two daughters, Anouk and Rosette, have settled after leaving Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. In the United States the book was published in 2008 as The Girl with No Shadow.

Vianne has given up magic and her mother's wandering way of life in the hope of giving her daughters a stable home. She runs a small chocolate shop, but life is hard: she and Anouk are often at odds, money is tight, her landlord Thierry Le Tresset presses her, and she has lost the inclination to make fine handmade chocolate. Anouk is an unhappy adolescent who is bullied at school and feels like an outsider in a city she dislikes. The arrival of Zozie de l'Alba changes things. Charming, bohemian and free-spirited, Zozie seems to embody the person Vianne once was, but she gradually reveals herself as a manipulator who steals identities and may be collecting souls. She insinuates herself into the family, works in the shop, helps Anouk against her tormentors and makes the business prosper, much to Thierry's displeasure. Meanwhile she quietly steers Vianne's romantic choices, between the security offered by Thierry and her bond with Roux, the father of Rosette, whom Vianne has never told.

The novel uses multiple narration, alternating first-person chapters by Vianne, Anouk and Zozie, which allows the reader to compare their perspectives and to grow suspicious of the newcomer's true nature. The chapters are grouped under headings drawn from mystical and religious references, and the book is full of allusions to traditions such as the Mexican Day of the Dead, Aztec mythology, the I Ching and the Golden Dawn. Its central theme is the tension between freedom and the wish to belong, and the price that may be paid for a better life when one surrenders control of oneself.

Reviewers generally regarded it as a bleaker and less gentle follow-up to its predecessor, and praised it chiefly for the ambiguity of Zozie and for its portrait of motherhood and of an adolescent's vulnerability. It remains part of the world of Chocolat, which Harris later expanded with further titles.