Book Report: Under the Egg

11. Laura Marx Fitzgerald, Under the Egg (2014) (5/5/19)

As an antidote to all the mysteries I've been reading, I picked up . . . a mystery, it turns out. But with no dead bodies. And written for middle schoolers. And in many of its basic premises, utterly ridiculous. (The cover blurb says it is "in the tradition of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler," which it sort of is—suspension of disbelief is absolutely key. [My report on that book can be found here, #2.])

The story concerns poverty-stricken thirteen-year-old Theodora Tenpenny, whose mother spends all her time in her bathrobe in her bedroom drinking expensive tea and working on Fermat's Last Theorem. They live in half of a dilapidated old house on Spinney Lane in Greenwich Village, where Theo raises chickens and beets in the garden and spends a lot of time canning and pickling. (It's summer, so school's out.)

Not long before the action gets going, Theo's beloved grandfather, Jack, is killed by a car. She arrives on the scene in time to hear his dying words: "Look under the egg. There's . . . a letter. And a treasure. Before it's too late."

Through a series of accidents and coincidences (remember, suspension of disbelief) Theo—along with a host of new friends she acquires while solving the mysterious puzzle of these words—discovers that a painting above Jack's mantel, ostensibly of an egg, is, perhaps, in fact a priceless Raphael. She also learns, to her surprise, that her grandfather had served in WWII, as one of the "Monuments Men" (featured not too long ago in a George Clooney movie). The speculations start to mount, and in the process we learn about art treasures stolen by the Nazis, and about tracking down Holocaust survivors, and about scientific analysis of artworks, and about Raphael.

It's all a romp, and although I wasn't quite in the mood for something so outlandish, I finished it because it was short and the story kept moving along. It all wraps up quite tidily, with a huge serendipity in the person of the petulant nextdoor neighbor and a nice discovery "under the egg."

In one scene, Theo and her brand-new bestie Bodhi (the only child of some busy movie stars, which gives her plenty of freedom to do whatever the heck she wants) visit a man, Mo, who was captured with Jack during the war and sent first to a POW camp, then to a slave-labor camp called Berga. He tells them the awful story of their time there.

 "You sound angry," [said Theo]. And it was no surprise. Knowing what happened at Berga, I understood why Jack stole back a painting from his friend's killers and hid it away for years. "I think my grandfather felt the same way."
 "Angry? Nah. I don't believe in anger. Only revenge."
 "How did you get your revenge?" asked Bodhi, looking around the room for another painting, waiting to be discovered.
 Mo gestured with one shaky hand to the photos that covered his wall: a patchwork quilt of weddings, bar mitzvahs, and family reunions; generations of baby pictures mixed in with vacation photos and more than one snapshot of someone receiving a plaque or presenting a giant check. "Genesis Fifteen. 'Look up at the heavens and count the stars. So shall be your descendants.' " Mo smiled. "That's enough revenge for me."