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The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
Oct. 25th, 2015 12:15 pmThe 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.
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.