Eggs (review)

Nine-year-old David is grieving the sudden loss of his mother by being angry and sullen to his grandmother, avoiding sunrises, and following rules. After all, if the janitor who had washed the floor had followed the rule of putting up a sign warning people that it would be slippery, his mother wouldn't have slipped, fallen down the stairs, and failed to show up the next morning, or ever, to see the sunrise with him as she promised. Thirteen-year-old Primrose is protesting the weirdness of her fortune-telling, not-altogether-there mother by moving into an abandoned van in the front yard of their decrepit house. The two first encounter each other in a spooky way—David stumbles upon Primrose pretending to be a dead body in the woods during an Easter egg hunt—and develop a tense but strangely loyal friendship when he sees her again, very much alive, at storytime in the library. Spinelli overlays the story of their friendship with a series of provocative images that are both real and symbolic: eggs, for instance, alternate between real eggs such as those local thugs throw at Primrose's van and the hard-cooked ones at the Easter egg hunt, and their symbolic resonance is visually similar to sunrises and metaphorically related to embryonic and fragile friendships. Primrose and David are also fascinated by a man who stands on a city corner and waves at everyone; Spinelli obliquely connects his bizarre behavior to that of these kids who are trying desperately to get someone to recognize what's behind their crusty and off-putting personalities and give them the recognition and response that, despite the well-meaning efforts of the adults in their lives, they are only getting from each other. This subtle symbolic layering, which may unfortunately be lost on more literal readers, turns an utterly ordinary plot of two grumpy, unlikely friends into a lyrical study of grief and hope.