Egg Must Hatch
By (Author) Mariken Jongman
By (author) Marieke ten Berge
Lemniscaat Ltd
Lemniscaat Ltd
16th January 2023
United Kingdom
Children
Fiction
839.3137
Hardback
32
Width 243mm, Height 320mm
420g
A child finds an egg, lying in snow and ice. Much too cold for an egg, of course - and so the child sets off to find someone to hatch it. The child travels around the world, calling on all sorts of animals. But no animal is willing or able to. Then, just as the child is about to give up... Mariken Jongman and Marieke ten Berge have created a lively and refreshing picture book story. The reader is carried along by the dreamily coloured landscapes created by Ten Berge, and by the child's increasingly desperate quest. A quest that is also very amusing, as when a snake would rather swallow the egg whole than hatch it, or a duck turns out to be much too small, or a whale just cannot sit on it, while an elephant could but had better not try, and so on. And as befits a picture book, the end is heart-warming. This book is the first that Jongman and Ten Berge made together, and it instantly makes one long for more.
Mariken Jongman writes youth theatre shows in which she also acts and sings. Lemniscaat previously published her picture book Wasbeer en otter redden een rups ('raccoon and otter save a caterpillar') and her widely acclaimed young adult books De opmerkelijke observaties van rits, Kiek and ADLEV ('Rits's remarkable observations', 'Kiek' and 'ADLE').