You Can’t Hatch an Egg
Ray Butrum
Hamer House Publishing (2024)
ISBN: 979-8327660939
Reviewed by Jennifer Donovan for Reader Views (01/2025)
“You Can’t Hatch an Egg” by Ray Butrum introduces young readers to how a chicken egg can be more than just a tasty breakfast. Hazel is excited about her extended visit with her grandparents! Her pregnant mother and her father drop her off to stay for a few weeks. When she wakes up the first morning, she smells breakfast cooking on the stove. Her grandmother asks her to fetch some more eggs from the henhouse, and to her surprise, when she creeps inside, a hen begins to speak!
The hen has a warning for Hazel: she must be careful not to drop the egg. A cracked egg cannot be eaten for breakfast, and it also has no chance of becoming a chick, so it would be wasted. While the hen would love to hatch a chick, she is content to let Hazel and her family cook the eggs she lays.
Discovering that the egg she holds could have the potential to hatch, Hazel wonders if she can hatch an egg herself. As they do not have an incubator, the hen offers to save her next egg and keep it warm until it hatches. The hen describes the process of a cell within the egg growing over three weeks into a chick, so Hazel might get to witness the process before her time with her grandparents comes to an end!
Beautifully illustrated by Ada Abigael Aco, “You Can’t Hatch an Egg” is a vibrant educational story for young children that teaches how mother hens incubate their eggs and how chicks grow within their shells. I especially loved the parallel of Hazel’s mother having a baby while Hazel stays with her grandparents, showing that the birth of a chick is very different!
As part of Ray Butrum’s Science With Hazel series, “You Can’t Hatch an Egg” educates young readers in an age-appropriate lesson about biology. A glossary at the end explains new words and concepts in more detail. Told through rhyming stanzas written in common meter, the pacing is ideal for reading aloud. I highly recommend “You Can’t Hatch an Egg” to parents, teachers, and librarians. Inquisitive preschoolers and elementary school students will enjoy learning how eggs have the potential to not only provide nourishment but also create new life.