Under the Egg
Ratings7
Average rating4.1
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler meets Chasing Vermeer in this clever middle grade debut When Theodora Tenpenny spills a bottle of rubbing alcohol on her late grandfather’s painting, she discovers what seems to be an old Renaissance masterpiece underneath. That’s great news for Theo, who’s struggling to hang onto her family’s two-hundred-year-old townhouse and support her unstable mother on her grandfather’s legacy of $463. There’s just one problem: Theo’s grandfather was a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she worries the painting may be stolen. With the help of some unusual new friends, Theo's search for answers takes her all around Manhattan, and introduces her to a side of the city—and her grandfather—that she never knew. To solve the mystery, she'll have to abandon her hard-won self-reliance and build a community, one serendipitous friendship at a time.
Tags
Genre
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
I bought this from Laura Marx Fitzgerald at least year's Princeton Children's Book Festival because it looked intriguing and she promised me that it was like the Westing Game. I think that's a decently fair synopsis – a fun YA romp, with lots of puzzles that are not too clever for the young adult set, but not so juvenile to make the book unreadable to an adult reader.
What really made Under the Egg stand out for me was the way that it made art accessible to an art-naive reader, such as me and most of the YA set. Without being pedantic or preachy, Fitzgerald's evocative descriptions of art, and her loving understanding of how and why paintings are made will stick with me for awhile.
