An Extraordinary Egg Hatches Something Unexpected

There are people who go through life looking for something amazing in every circumstance – and consequently finding it. This is an exciting way to live, since you never know what small discovery may be around the corner. It’s the outlook of Jessica, one of the three frogs in Leo Lionni’s An Extraordinary Egg, and this zest leads her to bring home a big pebble that turns out to be something even more interesting: an egg.

The egg, says Jessica’s know-it-all friend Marilyn, is a chicken’s egg. When it hatches, they all call it “the chicken”, but most young readers will probably already be aware of the fact that the creature that has emerged from the shell is not a chicken. Just hearing the frogs repeatedly call an alligator a chicken is a source of some amusement. Along with that humor, there is a sweetness to this story as the frogs so readily accept the newcomer, who manages to be independent from birth.

I enjoy Lionni’s painting style, which tends to be fairly simple, using basic shapes and colors to convey character and emotion in a minimalist way. His most impressive effort in terms of doing a lot with very little is little blue and little yellow, in which the main characters are a blue dot and a yellow dot. Though they have no facial features, they feel very expressive, and we always know which one is which, right up until the end. Here, the paintings are vibrant and expressive, but when the three frogs are together, I can’t tell the difference among them.

That’s partly because they’re all green, with the same eyes – white circles with black circles inside – and the same smiles. Their limbs look the same, and all three of them have brown shading. What’s more, after the egg shows up, they all start to act pretty similar. In the beginning, Jessica is an oddball by virtue of her exuberance, but all three of them find “the chicken” exciting. Jessica’s insistence upon enthusiasm finally led to something genuinely extraordinary, and now Marilyn and August have improved outlooks as a result.

It does seem a little strange that from that point in the story forward, the differences established at the beginning no longer seem in effect. The only difference is that Jessica can’t even begin to guess what this egg contains, whereas Marilyn and August think they have it all figured out. So there is a little lesson in there about being too cocky, even though, at the end of the story, they still believe that it was a chicken that hatched out of that egg.

Still, An Extraordinary Egg is a cute story for the 4 to 8 crowd. It’s a tale that celebrates friendship and looking upon the world with fresh eyes, expecting something exceptional every day. With that mindset, an extraordinary discovery is likely to be just around the corner.