This is one of those books you have to be in the right mood for. And if you're in the right mood for academically minded creative fiction that has a structure resembling shards of a cracked egg, read this in one sitting. It's bizarre in a good way.

This was for me the least successful book of the usually wonderfully entertaining Object Lessons series. Ostensibly about the humble egg, I found it too discursive and rambling, with the author often going off topic, and I would have preferred a more straightforward and factual account of the subject.

This Is an extraordinary book in a series about the hidden lives of ordinary things.  Nicole Walker uses a confiding style, which is perfect for purpose.  She presents a thoroughly unsystematic exploration of eggs, which slides from topic to topic and from prose-poem imagery to philosophical speculations to recipes to anecdotes on testing just how rotten A thing has to be before it is truly inedible. 

She begins with very personal accounts of fertility difficulties- "These eggs fulfilled neither me nor their destiny." - and a close friendship lost and regained. 

The particular is moved to cosmic scale with brief descriptions of the role of eggs in the creation myths of the Dogon, the Vedic myth, the Chinese myth of Pangu, etc., interspersed with frank autobiographical disclosures. "Getting outside the egg isn't easy. Humans are particularly bad at it but maybe it's the one thing writers have going for them."

A recipe for soufflé moves on, in cookery book style, to a recipe for global warming and a recipe for turtle extinction, with ingredients and methods listed in each case.

Walker wanders, on the path of friendship, into a short discussion of Primo Levi, concentration camps and how a cookery book survived in most unlikely circumstances.

The only negative is a double misunderstanding of Wordsworth's Daffodils.

"If you make it a little about you, your prose style won't sound like you're pressing hard boiled eggs through a sieve."  

Good advice, that Walker follows, leading to a wide-ranging skim over the topic, with deep dives at any moment and spiced up with insights like clicking through on the web being like breaking an egg shell.

Walker wishes:  "I want my books and my kids to be expansive, like meringue."  In the case of this multi-faceted book, she has fully succeeded.

Various cultures have creation myths based on the image of the egg, and also for this reason the author mostly speaks of eggs in terms of fertility and creation of new lives: the cover makes us think about chicken eggs, but egg of any dimension aim in creating new lives. From this themes the absence of creation follows, and the author shares personal experience about this topic.

Honestly I hoped more in real eggs, with respect to metaphorical ones, and the result is quite different from what I expected about this book.

Thanks to the publisher for providing me the copy necessary to write this review.