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A review by bethgiven
The Enormous Egg by Oliver Butterworth
2.0
Nate lives in the small town of Freedom, New Hampshire, where his family raises chickens. At the beginning of the summer, one of the chickens lays an enormous egg ... and when it finally hatches, Nate has a new pet: a triceratops!
The tone of this book was fun and conversational, and I was more or less enjoying the first half as I read this aloud with my eight-year-old for Battle of the Books. But then entire chapters went by with not a lot happening; the dinosaur is hardly on-page at all. Instead we have pages and pages of legislative efforts by some crazy senators to exterminate Nate's pet triceratops. I'm all for political activism, but this felt like a bait-and-switch! We had to pause the story quite often so I could explain a lot of background to my confused third grader: how bills become law, what senators do, the three branches of government ... not to mention dated technology that I barely know anything about (telegrams and telephone operators).
I did like learning that there is an Uncle Beazley statue in the National Zoo. I guess this is a classic, but mostly it just made me appreciate the fun literature that are on our library shelves now.
The tone of this book was fun and conversational, and I was more or less enjoying the first half as I read this aloud with my eight-year-old for Battle of the Books. But then entire chapters went by with not a lot happening; the dinosaur is hardly on-page at all. Instead we have pages and pages of legislative efforts by some crazy senators to exterminate Nate's pet triceratops. I'm all for political activism, but this felt like a bait-and-switch! We had to pause the story quite often so I could explain a lot of background to my confused third grader: how bills become law, what senators do, the three branches of government ... not to mention dated technology that I barely know anything about (telegrams and telephone operators).
I did like learning that there is an Uncle Beazley statue in the National Zoo. I guess this is a classic, but mostly it just made me appreciate the fun literature that are on our library shelves now.