THE ENORMOUS EGG.
By Oliver Butterworth '37. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press.Little, Brown, 1956. 187 pp. $2.95.
In Freedom, New Hampshire, live the Twitchells with their son, daughter and assorted livestock which is suddenly augmented by an exceptionally oversized egg. During the six weeks that the egg takes to hatch, the Twitchells become real people, Mom and Pop have a Yankee shrewdness and brevity of speech, Nate and Cynthia show the result of good upbringing but have not entirely yielded to it. The egg finally produces a tiny Triceratops (a horned dinosaur to you) who grows with incredible speed. The scientists come flocking along with sightseers and Freedom regains the fame it had during the 1932 eclipse. The difficulty of feeding the dinosaur plus its reptilian inability to survive a New Hampshire winter forces it to move to Washington where it ends up in the zoo. Nate and a helpful scientist, Dr. Ziemer, go along to supervise. After assorted tribulations the dinosaur's future becomes assured, as at the age of six months it was only 75 feet long and weighed 13,900 pounds.
After accepting the unlikely arrival of a Triceratops, the reader can settle clown to enjoy the book. It is written with a fine New England humorous understatement. The people are normal, their reactions to the unexpected are accurate and in character. The author manages to poke kindly fun at scientists, advertising men, economically minded Senators, TV and lobbying. He is also very kind to small boys, parents, zoo keepers and dinosaurs. Mr. Butterworth takes a highly improbable situation and makes a top-grade story. It is a double-barrelled affair, the children will be fascinated by the dinosaur and Nate's adventures, the adults by the deft inertion of mild satire and the straightforwardness of the tale. It can stand more than one reading. Mr. Darling's illustrations add greatly to the book.
