These Eggs Tell A Wonderful Tale

The Talking Eggs by Robert San Souci

I never tire of fairy and folk tales. It doesn't matter how familiar the elements are or how predictable the events, there is still something about them that touches a place in the soul.

Perhaps it is because they lack purity. I know of no tale that is preserved in perfect form from its original telling. As the stories pass orally from one teller to the next, they take on characteristics from each person. Each storyteller adds his or her own twists, making folktales a collaborative mishmash with the power to reach diverse audiences.

So it is with Robert San Souci's The Talking Eggs. He adapted his story from a collection of Creole folktales brought together by folklorist Alcee Fortier. The elements are familiar with broad strokes taken from European fairy tales. San Souci suggests that the tale, with its Cajun or Gullah overtones, was spread orally through the American South.

It is the story of a generous and kind younger sister who is forced to do all the work by her lazy cruel mother and sister. Blanche does a good deed for a stranger, an old woman who then comes to her rescue when she is driven away by her mother and sister. The woman takes her to a house with an admonition not to laugh at the strange sights she will behold. Blanche's obedience and good nature are richly rewarded.

But this is a folktale and a folktale cannot end until the wicked are punished. In this as well, The Talking Eggs follows traditional lives as the mother sends Rose, the older, greedy daughter after the riches that Blanche received. As expected, the two of them also reap their just reward.

Amidst the delightfully predictable elements are a fair number of fresh hits. The language is also rich in timbre. Scattered through the text are such colorful phrases as "sharp as forty crickets" and "looked like the tail end of bad luck." It adds to the lyrical quality that every good folktale needs.

The Talking Eggs bears two silver stickers on its cover. One recognizes the 1998 book as a Caldecott Honor Book, the other as a Coretta Scott King Award winner. In addition to those prestigious honors, the book has been honored as an ALA Notable Book, Booklist Children's Editor's Choice, Parents Choice Award and American Bookseller Pick of the Lists.

Although I hesitate to ever assign age groups to a book--each child is so very different in their likes and dislikes--the publisher marked this as a book for young readers. Personally, given that it is a folk tale and folk tales were meant to be delivered orally, I think it is a book for reading aloud to children of any age. Each two-page spread has a page of artwork and a page of text, making it a bit much for the youngest of readers.

The art is also notable. According to the disclaimer page, the art was done with pencil, colored pencil and watercolors. The pictures were then color separated and reproduced as red, blue, yellow, and black halftones. That's a shade too technical for my understanding. What I did understand was that the pictures were perfect in setting the scene as a sparsely populated area of the South sometime in the past 100 years. They managed to bring out the beauty and goodness of the simple while underscoring the wickedness of vanity. The richly painted pictures also brought to life the fairy tale aspects of the book: the two-headed cow, the funky chickens, and the eggs with either jewels or talking faces.

Robert San Souci is an author of both children's and adult books. Many of them are similarly magical and tell stories of lore. His brother is also an illustrator and the two have worked on two award-winning books. The illustrator of The Talking Eggs is Jerry Pinkney, a two-time Caldecott Honor artist whose work has also won such awards as the Christopher Award and the Coretta Scott King Award. He is an associate professor of art at the University of Delaware.

The Talking Eggs is a story replete with morals, as all good folklore is, and it is just the type of morals that I'm eager to share with my son--kindness, being true to one's word, and generosity. This library book was definitely a winner.

--B. Redman