Chickens are animals I generally associate with Easter: patient hens
laying eggs upon eggs to be whisked away for coloring and eating,
roosters crowing in the bright new morning. Aside from the Three French
Hens in The 12 Days of Christmas, though, I rarely think of them in conjunction with Christmas. So Janet Morgan Stoeke’s Minerva Louise on Christmas Eve was an interesting find.
Minerva Louise is a cheerful white hen with a red comb atop her head.
She wanders about her festively decorated farm with an air of exuberant
innocence that reminds me of Amelia Bedelia, Peggy Parish’s popular maid who is notoriously incapable of following simple instructions properly.
Nobody asks Minerva to follow any instructions. No, her self-appointed
task is simply to observe. So that’s what she does, looking at
everything with a fresh pair of eyes. Where most readers see a string of
Christmas lights wrapped around an outdoor evergreen, Minerva sees
fireflies “all dressed up in party colors”. Instead of an angel atop the
tree inside, she sees a pretty white hen. But that’s nothing compared
to her reaction to Santa Claus, his “truck” with the wheels that fell
off and his team of “goats” in fancy horns.
I love Minerva’s
attitude of wide-eyed wonder throughout the book as well as her
protective instincts when she fears that Santa Claus is depriving her
farmer’s family of their breakfast and unloading his junk in their
living room. And as a fan of Harry Potter in general and the marvelous Minerva McGonagall in particular, I love her name, which she also shares with my Build-a-Bear hippo.
The pictures, which take up most of each page, are fairly flat and
simplistic but still eye-catching, with Minerva herself a very
entertaining part of every picture. For a chicken with so few features,
she is surprisingly expressive!
What I’m not crazy about is
the lack of quotation marks, which makes it hard to keep track of what
is dialogue and what is narration. Cormac McCarthy
can throw the rules of punctuation to the wind if he so chooses, but do
we really want kindergarteners just learning the ropes to have to
struggle through that? At least the confusion comes in small doses, with
one or two lines in large print at the bottom of each page.
I
also think that the ending, while cute, is rather abrupt. Nonetheless,
Minerva Louise is a lovable enough character that I would recommend her
Christmas story to others and am anxious to check out her other books
for myself.
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