The Girl Who Was Convinced Beyond All Reason That She Could Fly

December 11, 2020

Gr 8 Up-Eggs is a teen girl who lives in a rusted-out industrialized city where she is known to her fellow residents as a flying folk hero. In detailed black-and-white artwork featuring spot colorization, Eggs is depicted as a light-skinned human girl with many birdlike qualities, including feral eyes, an angular haircut, and shoeless feet with a clawlike grip. Her closest friend is smart, silly, charming Grackle (Grack) McCart, who operates a bicycle hot dog cart; he has brown skin and dreadlocks. Grack provides Eggs with free hot dogs in exchange for help advertising his food cart. Splendid Fairy Wren, a pale-skinned punk rocker who pays rent by knitting socks, completes the trio. Together, Wren and Grack build Eggs a nest high atop the roof of an abandoned carpet factory, and soon Robin, the neighborhood bully, arrives to cause trouble. Eggs tends to borrow items from people without asking and often forgets to return them, and Robin is missing an expensive jacket. Robin launches an attack on Eggs, destroying her home. When Eggs goes missing, Robin reports seeing Eggs fly off toward the horizon, and readers will guess what has befallen her. Bird imagery in both text and artwork infuses the storytelling with magical realism. The interplay between the text and the artwork creates a seamless reading experience that gives readers a bird's-eye view of the action while cloaking the story in all the makings of a modern fairy tale. VERDICT Not an essential first purchase, but one that might appeal to reluctant YA readers.-Samantha Lumetta, P.L. of Cincinnati and Hamilton Cty., OH

Copyright 2020 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2020
A perpetually airborne girl catapults into a hot dog vendor's life. Eggs is not a bird but might as well be. She observes an unnamed metropolis from various perches on high, hopping around the city and occasionally "borrowing" clothes for warmth. One day Eggs (nicknamed because of her public service announcement T-shirt, reminding people to eat two servings a day) catches the eye of Grackle McCart, who runs a wildly popular food cart selling 100 varieties of hot dog. Soon, the two become close: Eggs swoops into Grackle's life when it suits her, and he provides her with all the hot dogs she can eat. Both Grackle and Splendid Fairy Wren, an aging punk hippie who prefers her own company, are captivated by Eggs' scattered and winsome charm and build their new friend a nest for cold weather, but a dangerous encounter proves Eggs can never be contained. Author and illustrator Lamb conjures an eccentric and original world of $5 punk hotels and multigenerational hot dog-business families and writes with a fantastical style that leaves readers perpetually wide-eyed in wonder. Characters are illustrated in vivid shades of red, blue, and green amid mostly black-and-white backdrops. Eggs and Wren are White; Grackle is Black. A vivid parable reminiscent of Francesca Lia Block. (Graphic fantasy. 14-adult)

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