EggAndSpoon

I picked up Egg and Spoon by Gregory Maguire on a whim. I think it was on sale or something. I didn’t do it because I’d read Wicked—since I’m one of the few people who didn’t fall in love with that book, even though there were some things I really liked about it—but because I rarely come across a book with Baba Yaga in it. Worth a try, I thought.

The interesting thing to me is that this is one of the few books that plays with the kid/grown up border in a particular way. Let me explain—no, there is too much; let me sum up.

Lots of kids books have allusions or jokes or themes that go over kids’ heads or that aren’t really there for them. Adults like them and stay interested. Especially if the book is a read-aloud (or kid movies, for that matter). And of course, there are more grown-ups like me these days who kind of sort of never outgrow children’s literature. In public even…mostly.

And there are lots of grown-up books (I use the term “grown-up” to avoid dealing with the multiple meanings of “adult” literature.) that have roots in children’s books. Especially fairy tale retellings, but not only those.

Egg and Spoon, however, feels like a grown up book to me. It doesn’t try to accommodate reading level or vocabulary—but then many children’s books do that. It’s more that the tone is the kind that a grown-up book has. The pacing. The ambiguity of the characters. However, this is where it seems strange in a good way to me: it never quite becomes “adult,” and by that I don’t mean just the racy stuff, but how close it gets to hard things. Plenty of hard stuff in here—family members who have died or are absent for sad reasons, illness, starvation, prison, and so on. And of course, if Baba Yaga is in there, you know that the author is at least going to bring up the topic of eating children. There are a couple of skulls…I don’t think that’s a spoiler to anyone who has ever read any Russian folk tales—as in ever.

And of course, if it has any kind of Russian roots, then there will be hard times ahead for the characters—and probably a past full of them as well.

Here’s a quote to give you an idea of what is wrong in the world of Egg and Spoon. The weather is all wrong, and not only that. But in Elena’s life, it amounts to no food and no adults that can protect her.

“What are we going to do? Such a bad harvest last summer and too little snow now to irrigate the fields come spring …” “The world is protesting. It feels like a summer cloudburst coming, yet the hymns of the high holidays still ring in our ears. Can the calendar turn inside out? Can a year run backward?” 

(And by the way, did you notice the nice hints of lyric prose in there? The book has a really nice layer of languge that doesnt get too pretentious.)

***

Here’s the thing. I’m kind of a wimp. One of the things I don’t like about grown-up books is that usually you’re an older person watching people suffer. You’re probably suffering yourself too, but it’s likely that you’re going to watch children suffer as an adult, and there is nothing you can do about it. I hate that. I just have a hard time with that. I tried to re-read Anna Karenina when my oldest child was a few months old. Big mistake. Would someone just feed the baby already? Who cares about the plot? Just feed the kid. We do not let babies cry with hunger and face starving to death in my world. Just don’t.

And violence. And abuse. Same story. You get the idea. I’m not going to go there because I don’t.

So Egg and Spoon. There are hard things in there, sure, but it doesn’t get too close to them. It deals with them in the way that children’s books do. You get the idea. You feel for how hard a child’s life is, but the hard things are from a child’s perspective, and they never cross the line (in my opinion) to too much. The author never hurts you—he goes there with you and holds your hand and you think about the world together.

Some authors like to take you to the edge of the cliff, wait until you’re peering over, and then kick you from behind. Have you noticed? They give helpful comments as you fall and then splat on the bottom. “See?” they say, very helpfully. “Wasn’t that awful? Did you notice how awful that was?” Yep. Got it.

Back to Egg and Spoon again. No cliff. No splat. Not quite poetic, but close to it. Lots of things I wanted to highlight. Observations that people make. Lots of characters that are tangled up in their choices. I didn’t say good and bad choices, because the narrator doesn’t really judge their actions. He points them out fairly often and thinks about how this person or that person had to choose, but there isn’t the Victorian flavor of helpfully letting you know what is right and wrong. Just that it’s a tough spot to be in. I felt more permission to be a flawed human than I usually find in books. It was…kind of nice.

But now that we have had the “grown up book that you don’t have to be afraid to read even though it’s not a fluffy book” discussion, I wanted to just point out the tone. It’s really fun.

Now I wondered just at first. For the first while in the book, there isn’t any magic, and Elena is in a tough spot. Her father has died, her brothers are gone, and her mother is very probably dying—especially since they don’t have any real food. I admit that I wasn’t sure that I wanted to stick it out for over eleven hours. (I started with an audio book on a long drive and then switched back and forth between Kindle and Audible when I got home.) But it was so worth it.

If you’re not sure, you could even skip to about section 27 (of 80-something) in the audio book just to hear the Baba Yaga part get going and see if you like what the fun and magic is like when it really gets going. All I’ll say is that Baba Yaga is a lot of fun. I’m not sure if she’s a “pure” Baba Yaga or not. She has the danger of the fairy tale Baba Yaga—but then she also quickly becomes—if I say zany or wacky, you’ll get the wrong idea. Mad with a method might be a better way to explain it.

Here are a few quotes just to give you a taste:

“Let’s see what we have in the larder. We have eye of newt and toe of frog, carbon-crisp residue of manticore loin, a beaker of all-natural belladonna extract, some wolfbane, some romaine, a poteen of ptomaine, and a few limp radishes in butter, pinched from the platter left out for Marat after his bath, which he never got to since he died therein. Let’s have cheerios.”

“I don’t know what cheerios are,” said Cat.

“They haven’t been invented yet. You’ll love them.”

* * *

“Furniture!” bellowed the witch. “Tables, bathtub, the lot of you. It’s time to go out in the world and seek your fortunes, if that’s your hope.” There was a crashing sound as all the furniture went and tried to hide under the bed, and the bed tried to hide under itself.” 

***

It’s really fun. So I’m not sure that Baba Yaga is a “true” Baba Yaga, but I do feel that she fits the spirit of a strange other-world character interacting with real life and changing it, morphing hard times into a fairy tale. Adventures are more fun than just dreary adversity. And if life gets pulled into an adventure in the forest that goes to the forest in the North in a house with chicken legs, all the better. This Baba Yaga kept reminding me of both of the witches in Spirited Away. Not exactly like that, but I think you’ll see snatches of a resemblance here and there.

I don’t want to spoil, but since there is foreshadowing, I don’t mind giving you a hint: There’s an ice dragon and a firebird. And of course, you’ll find an egg that was stolen or lost or might break or won’t hatch. Those are all in there, taking their turns and sometimes sharing scenes. The Tsar gives a festival in flooded Petersburg on floating pavilions connected together with light-strung bridges. He wants his godson to meet all of the young ladies and become betrothed—but lest things get too Cinderella-ish, none of the three young people involved particularly want to become betrothed to anyone. In fact, the prince is just bored with a grown-up party. And then—but I forgot, no spoilers. Drat.

Well, if we can’t talk about the table with four human legs and the magical thing that Elena sees in the forest, and the black chicken whose wish is granted, then I’ll just have to leave you with one of the philosophical quotes by people who might have been side antagonists and who turn out to be real people:

“Now we’d help her if we could. We can’t. So we’re helping you. That’s all that most of us who are not Tsars or witches can manage to do.”

I think I might read this one again. And did I mention that even though a house with chicken legs can’t talk, it still can have maternal feelings? Regardless of whether or not it really was created out of a Mendel-based genetic engineering experiment that went a little bit wrong.