Pick a Perfect Egg

4.3

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Author(s)

Patricia Toht

Co-Authors / Illustrators

Jarvis

Genre(s)

Age Range

Release Date

February 14, 2023

ISBN

978-1536228472

Buy This Book

Pick a perfect egg with care—
Choose a white one nestled there.
Gather more and softly stack them.
Just be cautious not to crack them!

Pairing Jarvis’s joyous illustrations with Patricia Toht’s wonderfully rhythmic text, this holiday ode hops through a busy springtime day all the way to Easter Sunday. From the farm where you’ve carefully selected your eggs—eggs perfect for drawing on with crayon, for plopping into dyes and bejeweling—follow along as preparations continue for the much-awaited festivities. Then on Sunday, open your door and search for eggs of a different kind, filled with foil-wrapped chocolate, spinning tops, and jelly beans. This cheerful Easter-time read-aloud captures all the excitement of the holiday and is sure to become part of a new treasured tradition.

Editor review

1 review

Dye some eggs! Have some fun!

February 04, 2023

Overall rating

4.3

Plot

4.0

Characters

4.0

Writing Style

4.0

Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)

5.0

A little girl and her mother go through all of their preparations for making colored eggs for Easter, including buying them from a "pick your own" market, boiling them, and dying them with a variety of natural and commercial dyes. After the eggs are all done, the girl goes to bed dreaming of the next day, when she wakes up with great glee, dons a bunny suit, and proceeds to an Easter Egg hunt outside with her friends. They find and collect a variety of plastic eggs in their decorated baskets, then add some of the home dyed eggs to make an appealing decoration.

Told in rhyming verse and illustrated in bright spring colors, this book captures the fun and merriment of Easter rituals in a secular way. The poetry boldly used trochaic lines, which is hard to pull off, but the scansion holds up really well, and trochees certainly propel the story forward with a lot of excitement. (ADD some water... SET a timer...) There is just the right amount of text on each page for a read aloud, and I imagine that this is a book that will get read repeatedly leading up to the holiday.

Good Points

I don't know that I have ever seen a picture book that gives so many details about how to color eggs, but this even talked about using white crayon to create designs on eggs before they were dyed. I'll forgive the omission of the coolest way I have ever seen to dye eggs: wet a flower or leaf and place it on the egg, then wrap it in onion skins, tie up in a rag, and boil it. The eggs have a cool golden or red (depending on the skins you use) effect, and a white spot where the foliage was placed!

In my family, DuBose Heyward's 1939 The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes was our go-to Easter book, more for the female empowerment than anything else. Sadler's It's Not Easy Being a Bunny was a close second. This would have been a popular choice, since dying eggs and going to a local egg hunt in a park always played a big part in our activities. The cover is beautiful, and begs to be part of an Easter decorating display!