Book Review | Egg & Spoon by Gregory Maguire

I bought this at Half-Priced books in Louisville, KY and I am just honestly so taken aback by how much this amazing novel by Gregory Maguire managed to move me. I'm not normally into the kid-lit fantasy genre if it's not a short novel. This one was 475 pages of an amazingly epic fairy tale-esque adventure and I did not regret a page of reading it.

Basically, a peasant girl from Russia named Elena is taking care of her mother all alone. Her brothers gone, her dad dead, her mother on the brink of death. She thinks everything is hopeless until a train stalls in her village due to a lightening bolt. 

This is when she meets a girl named Ekaterina. She's rich and is traveling to St. Petersburg in order to impress the Tsar's godson, something she doesn't really much care for to begin with.
One day, the girls were hanging out and with a jolt of the train, their lives change forever. They end up switching places when Elena decides she should go ahead and try to find her brother and bring him home to help her take care of their mother.

While Elena is pretending to be Ekaterina, Ekaterina encounters a witch named Baba Yaga and together they travel to St. Petersburg. Baba for her own reasons, Ekaterina to reunite with the people she knows after being ran out of Elena's village.

Even though this book is aimed towards the younger crowd, I think you have to be older to truly acknowledge some of the aspects of Maguire's novel. There's struggle between classes and they're discussed in an type of way that makes you pay attention.

The narrator is someone with infinite amount of wisdom, and wise beyond his years. You can tell it in his dialogue as he tells Elena and Ekaterina' story.

This one was fun and entertaining, but also a novel to ponder over. I know I'll be thinking of it for months to come.

"Your life story is really about how the hands of history caught you up, played with you, and you with them. History plays for keeps; individuals play for time."