The Girl Who Was Convinced Beyond All Reason That She Could Fly

Gr 8 Up–Eggs is a teen girl who lives in a rusted-out industrialized city where she is known to her fellow residents as a flying folk hero. In detailed black-and-white artwork featuring spot colorization, Eggs is depicted as a light-skinned human girl with many birdlike qualities, including feral eyes, an angular haircut, and shoeless feet with a clawlike grip. Her closest friend is smart, silly, charming Grackle (Grack) McCart, who operates a bicycle hot dog cart; he has brown skin and dreadlocks. Grack provides Eggs with free hot dogs in exchange for help advertising his food cart. Splendid Fairy Wren, a pale-skinned punk rocker who pays rent by knitting socks, completes the trio. Together, Wren and Grack build Eggs a nest high atop the roof of an abandoned carpet factory, and soon Robin, the neighborhood bully, arrives to cause trouble. Eggs tends to borrow items from people without asking and often forgets to return them, and Robin is missing an expensive jacket. Robin launches an attack on Eggs, destroying her home. When Eggs goes missing, Robin reports seeing Eggs fly off toward the horizon, and readers will guess what has befallen her. Bird imagery in both text and artwork infuses the storytelling with magical realism. The interplay between the text and the artwork creates a seamless reading experience that gives readers a bird’s-eye view of the action while cloaking the story in all the makings of a modern fairy tale.