by Moe Zilla

Created on: August 27, 2010

Mr. and Mrs. O'Grady "were so poor they dug one potato from their little garden every day, called it breakfast, lunch, and supper, and considered themselves lucky to have it."

The couple is so skinny that they can sit side by side on the same chair - and they only own one chair. They have one ragged coat which they share in the winter, and to conserve their only candle, they never actually light it. It's a disturbing story if you think about it too long, but the author does a good job of establishing her humble yet hopeful characters. "They had one gold coin," she writes, "which they were saving for a rainy day."

"One Potato, Two Potato" was written by Cynthia DeFelice, who shares a few deep details about the couple's inner psyche. The deepest wish of Mrs. O'Grady is "a friend, someone with whom she could share recipes for boiled potatoes and sweet memories of how it felt to touch her newborn babies' downy heads." Mr. O'Grady also "longed for a friend, someone with whom he could discuss potato weevils and root rot." But instead, Mr. O'Grady discovers a magic pot buried in his garden - and when he puts one potato into the pot, he's able to pull out two!

Stories about magic are always fun, but this one has sort of a dark vibe.  The couple is extremely poor, and yet the magic pot is inevitably going to cause them problems. They test the pot's magical abilities by dropping in one hairpin and retrieving two - and then doing it again. (Then, now that she had three hairpins, Mrs. O'Grady starts arranging her hair.) They use the pot to produce household necessities - a second coat, an extra blanket - and of course, lots and lots of extra potatoes. But their most practical idea was duplicating their single gold coin...again, and again, and again!

Honestly, I found this book's plot twist a little disturbing. Mrs. O'Grady trips on the carpet, falls head first into the pot, and emerges as two Mrs. O'Grady's. "One wife is all I ever wanted," Mr. O'Grady complains, but then she proposes a solution - "Jump into the pot yourself." Then everyone has a friend, and every Mr. O'Grady has a Mrs. O'Grady.

And then they bury that crazy pot, since they now have everything that they could ever want.

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