The Goose Egg

Henrietta is a quiet-loving elephant who “savored the stillness of the morning as she sipped her Darjeeling” from a porcelain teacup grasped in her trunk. She enjoys swimming underwater in the lake, where she gets “lost... in her thoughts.” One day, though, she gets “a little too lost” and drifts head-first into a piling, knocking a goose egg from its nest. She’s unaware that the egg has landed between her ears, so when she feels a metaphorical “goose egg,” she dutifully bandages her sore head and waits “for the bump to heal.” After the fuzzy gosling hatches from the egg and identifies Henrietta as “Mama!”, and her actual mother is nowhere to be found, the pachyderm takes the imprinting to heart, painting her face and trunk to resemble a goose’s body and neck as a teaching aid before she shows the gosling how to look for food, swim, and flap her wings. Though Henrietta urges Goose to fly, the elephant doesn’t love the quiet so much after her charge is gone. Wong (Quackers) solves that conundrum in a cacophonous finale to her quirky family tale. Ages 4–8. [em](Jan.) [/em]