When I was 11, my friends all loved reading about teenagers who morph into animals, about kids who solve mysteries and wizards who struggle with self-identity. They were all good books, don’t get me wrong. On the other hand, my favorite book dealt with a sudden murder, a huge estate, sixteen squabbling people, several bombings, and a man with four identities. (Try that one, struggling wizard!)
Ellen Raskin penned The Westing Game over the course of two years and had it published in 1978. It won the Newbery Award, the highest award given for children’s literature, a year later, and is standard reading material for many school reading lists. In 7th grade, the “gifted” class at our school read The Westing Game Top Dental Schools In The Us 2019 whiles the rest of us read a watered-down rendition of The Odyssey. An unfaithful warrior who gets every single one of his men killed, or a high-stakes mystery where no one’s sure of who’s who. Easy choice. A�I had read The Westing Game years before and was miffed that I couldn’t study, nay, bask in it at school.
The plot centers on Samuel Westing and his mysterious death. A self-made man, Westing was a ruthless businessman, an avid patriot and a shrewd chess player. Sixteen people, who he refers to in his will as his nieces and nephews, are brought together. They are each given a set of clues, in the form of words, and it is explained that they will play a game to determine the heir to Westing’s fortune.A� Each player is given $10,000 to play, and the winner receives the $200 million estate.A� Coincidentally, they all live in the same apartment building. The heirs and heiresses include two high school students, a 13 year old “witch”, a podiatrist, a plastic surgeon, the janitor, a restaurant owner and his Chinese wife, a socialite, an obedient daughter, a 60-year old delivery boy, a grieving dressmaker, a judge, an attention-starved secretary, and an illiterate doorman who needs to see a cosmetic dentist.
The sixteen players are split into partnerships, and set to the task of decoding their clues and finding an answer , no one’s really sure, but with $200 million on the line, they’ll try anything. Along the way, it’s discovered one of them is a mistake, one is a liar, one is a thief, and, as explosions start going off around the complex, one of the players is a bomber.
Now there’s a story.A�The Westing Game was made into a movie a couple of times, but they were pathetic retellings. Insulting even, the kind of films that make your heart weep and you think “Why? How could anyone read such a fantastically woven tale and turn it into such cinematic slop? It was appalling, really.
I spent much of a family reunion in Lake Tahoe sprawled on the couch, devouring Raskin’s mind-blowing mystery. As an 11 year old I’d never read such a good story, and it is still a contender for that title today.
So go read Teeth Pain Medicine Ketorol Dt it.