The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

[lightreads]

The Westing Game (Puffin Modern Classics)

4/5. Seventies YA, from before we called it YA. Sixteen tenants of a new apartment building are drawn into an elaborate scavenger hunt for a vast inheritance.

You guys, I had not reread this since my early teens, when I read it many . . . many . . . many times.

I think Turtle Wexler is my patronus.

This is so great. It is a mystery, but not really the sort you are supposed to solve. And it's a story of eight pairs of disparate people coming together. As the book might say, one of them is a thief, one of them is a bomber, one of them is a bookie, and one of them is Turtle. The book pauses to ask them, in a couple of places, who they are. They have to sign for receipt of various inheritance documents, and each time they must name their profession. And each naming is different. Who are you? the book keeps asking, and the answers start out funny, and then get more and more truthful, and in some cases more and more raw. "Person," Angela signs at one point. Ouch.

Anyway, if you want a #diversityin YA book, here's one for you. This sucker is barely sixty thousand words, at a guess, and yet it juggles sixteen main characters, and passes lightly but directly over transgenerational immigrant issues, and disability from about seven different angles, and the intersectionality of blackness and womanness, and immigrant families again, and class-climbing, and class-transgressing, and and and. I mean, I didn't always like every little gesture it made, but it caught me flat-footed at least once thinking I had spotted its ablism when nope, I really hadn't, it knew all along what it was doing, and that was something I hadn't spotted at all.

Also, Turtle. Who is twelve and neglected and smart, and who plays the stock market, and isn't scared until she is, and who can and will kick you if you get in her way.

Comments

[runpunkrun]

I also read this book repeatedly as a teenager, and have meant to check back in with it and see if it's still readable or if it's full of failures I was too young to spot the first time around. Your review is very encouraging.

[lightreads]

Read it! I mean, like I said, I'm not sure about all of it -- there's a few particulars re disability that made me go 'hrm?' -- but it is so worth it.

[kate_nepveu]

Ditto.

There was some really good fic out of Yuletide last year, if you hadn't seen it:

http://archiveofourown.org/works/1090913 - Compensation - character study of Judge Ford, how her chess games with Sam Westing might have gone, and how her chess games with Turtle might go.

http://archiveofourown.org/works/1096374 - The Game's Afoot: Five Games Alice Introduced Turtle To - Turtle as an aunt

http://archiveofourown.org/works/1092630 - The Theodorakis Guide to the Heirs of North America - lovely, thoughtful future fic from Chris's POV that gives the reader a look at many of the other heirs.

[jadelennox]

That third one, about Chris, was a request I've been making on and off from my first Yuletide, and Galaxysoup delivered exactly the story I needed. Amazing, painful, poking into the weakness of the text as well as its strengths. Perfect, spot-on, perfect.

[kate_nepveu]

How lovely. It's really terrific.

[fyreharper]

Hmm perhaps I am due for a reread as well :) (Turtle! <3)

[ellen_fremedon]

YES to all this. I read this book to pieces, and reread it a couple of years ago, and it holds up beautifully.

[teafeather]

It's been over 20 years since the last time I read this, so I'm probably due. Did you read the NLS version or something else?

[lightreads]

NLS. The BARD copy is a digital version of the same old recording I recall from the 90's, not a re-record. I approve. Still bitter about the re-record of Over Sea, Under Stone

[teafeather]

I just checked BARD and there are now 2 different versions of Over Sea, Under Stone. DB 08832 is read by Terry Hayes Sales. Is that the one from the 1990s?

[lightreads]

Yep. It went up after I was done resentfully reading the other copy. But at least it's there now. Tbf, the quality on those old recordings can be quite bad, but eh, whatever.

[cyphomandra]

Oh, I loved this book. I am in fact saving Figgs and Phantoms for some future book requiring moment, because I don't want all of her other books to be over.

[jadelennox]

I reread Figgs and Phantoms more rarely than WG, because it's a more difficult book. But I love it, too.