Book Log: Eggs, by Jerry Spinelli
Apr. 2nd, 2007 02:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grammargirlEggs falls squarely into the patented genre of Jerry Spinelli books about quirky friendships between outcast kids. In this case, the kids are nine-year-old David and thirteen-year-old Primrose. David spends most of his time taking his considerable store of anger out on the grandmother with whom he was sent to live after his mother died in a freak slip-and-fall accident; he only sees his traveling-salesman father on weekends. Primrose lives with her whimsical-to-the-point-of-crazy fortune teller mother in a tiny house on a forgotten street; she treasures a framed picture of the father she has never known and is so desperate for a room of her own that she moves into the junker car on her lawn and decorates it like a miniature house. The two meet after David finds Primrose pretending to be a corpse at an Easter egg hunt, and they quickly form a tight friendship.
My favorite thing about this book is that, unlike some of Spinelli's other books, the child protagonists actually sound and act like kids. David and Primrose's friendship is not saccharine-coated or idealized; rather, the two bicker and grouse and argue constantly, and the depth of their affection for each other is an electric undercurrent beneath the surface chaos. There are some priceless tiny moments in this book: David's desperate belief that following all the rules will bring his mother back (and the near-obsessive compulsive behaviors that result from this belief), Primrose dressing up as David's mother so the two children can go to a Halloween event without their guardians, the tiny white picket fence that Primrose builds around her "room." All serve as poignant illustrations of the healing power of friendship between two damaged, but not broken, children.
My favorite thing about this book is that, unlike some of Spinelli's other books, the child protagonists actually sound and act like kids. David and Primrose's friendship is not saccharine-coated or idealized; rather, the two bicker and grouse and argue constantly, and the depth of their affection for each other is an electric undercurrent beneath the surface chaos. There are some priceless tiny moments in this book: David's desperate belief that following all the rules will bring his mother back (and the near-obsessive compulsive behaviors that result from this belief), Primrose dressing up as David's mother so the two children can go to a Halloween event without their guardians, the tiny white picket fence that Primrose builds around her "room." All serve as poignant illustrations of the healing power of friendship between two damaged, but not broken, children.
