Eggs

Eggs is a novel for young readers by the American writer Jerry Spinelli, published in 2007. It describes a friendship between two children who have very little in common beyond the fact that each of them is on their own.

David Limpert's mother dies after slipping on a wet floor with no warning sign, and his reaction is to become quiet and to construct a set of rules for himself, some of them invented on the spot, on the understanding that if he follows them all exactly she may come back. His father is a sales manager who returns home only at weekends, so the person actually raising him is his grandmother, whom he largely ignores.

Primrose has been raising herself in a house where her mother behaves like a child, and she has no father that she knows of, only a photograph. The two of them form an attachment that is close and argumentative by turns, and the novel follows the year in which each of them works out something about what they have lost and what they can still do about it. Spinelli wrote it as a book about friendship and recovery rather than about grief as an illness.