Title:

Egg Marks the Spot

Author:

Amy Timberlake

Category:

Literature

Rating:

Date Reviewed:

May 14, 2022

kunk and Badger return for a second adventure. This time, in Egg Marks the Spot, the two roommates set out on a camping expedition. Badger wants to get into the field and do some Important Rock Work. Skunk has not been camping previously, but he is enthusiastic. Unfortunately, the inexperienced Skunk overpacks by a wee bit. Much of the opening chapters involve Skunk's enormous yellow pack and all the unnecessary equipment he hauls along (a cast iron skillet?!). Badger, meanwhile, is ultra careful with his packing - he is the type of backpacker who will snap the handle off the end of his toothbrush to save a few grams of weight.

Campsite #5 at Endless Lake is where Badger found his first glorious rock - an agate that he treasured until his ruthless cousin Fisher stole it. Badger wonders if perhaps exploring the same landscape, he might discover a new agate to complete his rock collection. But something seems to be up with Skunk. He is whispering to the chicken; there seems to be a secret that Skunk and the Chicken don't want known. Badger surreptitiously follows Skunk to a hidden cave that goes deep into the hillside, and makes an astonishing discovery.

Although it is fun to see the characters from Skunk and Badger in a new book, I felt that the plot of this novel was too hodge-podge. Rather than telling a complete story, Timberlake instead seems to have thrown together a bunch of scenes and tried to stitch them together to tell a coherent story. But the end result seemed unfinished to me, with so much unexplained.

Where did the bear come from?

The whole subplot of Mr. G. Hedgehog who wants to read Skunk's New Yak Times Review of Books is at the beginning of the story, and then disappears until the final chapter, when it is resolved as a simple misunderstanding.

There are several bizarre happenings that leave Badger wondering "How can this be happening? It is impossible!" A spatula that cuts through a rope? A dinosaur hatching from a fossilize egg? Yet Timberlake provides the reader no hint of an explanation for these strange occurrences, it seems like these plot points were merely stuck into the story so that the plot could advance.

The main plot of the novel concerns the fate of the chickens and the dinosaur, yet these characters literally disappear from the story and are not seen again. What happened? Badger deciphers some chicken scratch that says "all is well", but that is hardly a resolution to the questions about the final outcome of the dinosaur.

At the end of the novel, two orphaned young rats, Zeno and Zephyr, appeal to Skunk and Badger to move in. Why stick this late developing subplot into the story? It seemed like Timberlake was padding the length.

It seemed as if Timberlake had a bunch of ideas and scenes that she wanted to tell about Skunk and Badger, but the ideas are so disparate that they don't fit together to make a well constructed plot. It is especially frustrating to have the dinosaur and chickens just vanish. I assume this means that Timberlake is intending to bring all these characters back for a grand resolution in a third novel. I will probably read it, if I see it.