Eggs-capade! The Chickens Are Coming! by Barbara Samuels

One day Mommy, Winston, and Sophie saw an interesting sign:

MY CHICKENS NEED A HOME!
I'm moving and I can't take them with me!

Inexplicably, Daddy declares that chickens can be pets, and Winston immediately expresses a wish to walk a chicken. And before they know it, their backyard is transformed into a hen habitat and ... Sophie declares,

"THE CHICKENS ARE HERE!"

There are five different sorts of hens--Desiree, Daphne, Divina, Delilah, and Dawn--one striped and speckled French hen, one Rhode Island Red, one fat and fluffy Chinese hen, one sleek golden hen, and one with a topknot of long, droopy feathers. They all run away from Winston's attempts to make friends.

"Why don't they like me?" he shouts.

As the chickens settle down in their lovely new coop, the kids can't wait for their eggs--those all-they-can-eat eggs. None are found. What they do find is... ... plenty of chicken poop to scoop!

Sophie serenades the hens with her violin tunes and Winston reads them bedtime stories.

Finally there's a wake up call from the chicken coop.

Buk BUK BAWK!

And the next morning, there are eggs all over the yard, but it seems that the chickens have made an eggs-cape!

THE CHICKENS WERE GONE!

But when Sophie suggests that they follow the poop trail, the kids discover all five hens hanging out in the family room, roosting on the sofa, watching a video, and snacking on last night's leftover pizza.

And there are all the eggs they can eat for breakfast in Barbara Samuels' homey and cozy chicken story, The Chickens Are Coming! (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), illustrated in jolly style by the author to show off the individual differences between family members and their poultry pets. With the new popularity of raising chickens in urban settings, this brownstone-dwelling, adventurous city family stars in a story that hits the ups and downs of poultry raising with good humor and just enough poultry lore for a fun read-aloud that kids will find egg-cellent storytime fare."Samuels gets excellent comic mileage by drawing her hens as unblinkingly unflappable," quips Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal sums this chicken caper up, saying "Chickens rule the roost."