Egg and Spoon by Gregory Maguire

It’s been a busy couple of months since I last posted, but with bathroom renovations almost complete, colleagues over their ailments at work, and various other interruptions out of the way, it’s time to knuckle down to writing, blogging and occasionally tweeting again.

I have been reading Egg and Spoon by Gregory Maguire for our “Witches” themed book club discussion next month.  I’ve never read anything by Maguire before and I found this book both enjoyable and frustrating. 

The book is strongly steeped in Russian folklore interspersed with a spattering of pre-revolution Russian history.  I really enjoyed the folklore elements: the elusive fire-bird, the irritable ice dragon, and the wise-cracking witch Baba Yaga in her capricious house.  I also initially liked the two main characters, Elena and Katerina, whose lives, in one fateful moment, get swapped about. 

There’s so much to like in this story, and perhaps that’s the problem.  There’s just too much happening: Matryoshka dolls marrying dragon-tooth soldiers, a subversive/subservient feline, Tsar Nicholas, Rasputin and an unnamed monk locked in a tower, train travel, tornado travel, and the Tsar’s adventure loving godson, the list goes on.  These are all very entertaining, but by the end of the book, I found I didn’t care as much about the main characters as I did in the earlier chapters when their lives and the complications were simple.

I also have a problem with books, particularly children/YA books that make too many obscure references.  How many children, or even adults, will know anything about Caligula, Robespierre, Benedict Arnold, or Tallulah Bankhead?  And those were mentioned in just one paragraph!  There were at least a dozen more seemingly irrelevant references like that.  When I read, I don’t want to take myself out of the story to go search Google to find out who the author is talking about.  The same goes for words that don’t even appear in a dictionary.  I read to be transported out of the ordinary world into an extraordinary one.  I can tolerate looking up one or two things if they are relevant to the story; any more than that gets annoying.

All that said, some of the writing was lovely – particularly descriptions of the Russian countryside and St Petersburg – and the banter between Baba Yaga and her cat was rather witty.  As I said, there is much to enjoy in the book, but I think simplifying the story would have made it more powerful.  The message to Live your life seemed tacked on at the end when carrying on the theme of need and greed would have been more appropriate.

“Oh, the peskiness of brute childhood!  I always detested it!” remarked the witch.

“Nonesense,” replied the kitten.  “You ate children for a living and loved it.”

‘Yes, but by invitation only.  A mob is an ugly thing, and the younger, the uglier.”

― Gregory Maguire, Egg & Spoon