Egg (and In the Middle of Fall) by Kevin Henkes

Today's guest contributor, Robbin Friedman, is a children's librarian at the Chappaqua Library. She writes reviews for School Library Journal, serves on ALSC's Excellence in Early Learning Digital Media committee and will soon begin as a member of the 2019 Newbery Committee. 

Two-time Geisel honoree Kevin Henkes returns this year with two accessible offerings: In the Middle of Fall, illustrated by his wife, Laura Dronzek, and Egg, with Henkes’s own paintings. In the Middle of Fall complements the duo’s When Spring Comes with a gentle exploration of the colors of autumn. Gorgeous and contemplative, the book perfectly captures the look, the feel, the sounds of fall as it tips into winter; it practically smells like woodsmoke and leaf matter. But while the book shines as an autumn read-aloud, the hushed beauty of changing seasons doesn’t quite propel emerging readers through the pages.

Image from Egg by Kevin Henkes

The candy-colored Egg, on the other hand, uses limited text to tell a suspenseful and humorous story, melding picture book and comics formats to great effect. Opening with four different-colored eggs, the pink, yellow, and blue quickly crack to reveal charming pastel birds, leaving only the green egg to sit intact. For pages. And pages. Early readers will enjoy the visual humor of the stubbornly unbroken egg; chances are, they’ll also have learned the word "waiting" by the seventeenth repetition around page 12. Presumably tired of all this waiting, the perplexed hatchlings from the first three eggs return to examine the green oddity and coax the inhabitant out. Spoiler alert: egg number four does NOT produce a bird. 

As an introductory comic, Egg nails the format. The straightforward presentation of one, four or sixteen panels per page allows for variety in the storytelling but ensures early readers can follow the plot without struggle. Henkes also embraces the format’s strengths for visual narrative: a sense of time conveyed by repetitive panels, the impact of a full-page picture after a series of smaller images, the sense of movement depicted as characters appear to exit the frame. And he avoids some of the potential complications by skipping speech bubbles and limiting the text--in a clean, non-serif font--to the bottom of each frame. This accessible version of sequential art allows a complete story to emerge from a text that uses only fifteen different words (for all it uses peck 63 times). That limited vocabulary features a couple of challenges, but Henkes expressive animal faces and repetition of both words and sounds--plus the decoding oases of wordless spreads--will usher readers through the tricky parts. 

Image from Egg by Kevin Henkes

Some emerging readers may be surprised as the final sunset morphs into an egg and hints at a continuing narrative, evoking the cyclical nature of life and storytelling. But this mild detour into the surreal shouldn’t bother most readers, even if the dreamlike illustrations don’t quite support the few remaining words of text (an inevitable trade off for introductory surrealism). Either way, most readers will find themselves completely satisfied by the friendly resolution among the hatchlings and happy to coast through the final pages. And then they’ll likely start this Geisel contender again.