So I read this for the first time in October 2016 and again this November and then my mom read it aloud AGAIN right after.

And I love it more each time I hear it.

. Raskin writes with such wit
. It's like implicit humor XD
. There's so much packed into every sentence, paragraph ...
. The characters are so diverse - naturally diverse
. Like it doesn't feel forced at all
. I adore the characters so much and how they grew closer and started complementing one another
. The mystery is amazing! I watched the movie first so unfortunately I always knew the outcome while reading but still!
. How it's woven through and plotted and all the intricate details is remarkable!
. Every time you read it you understand it a bit better.
. Also the end chapters <333
. My favorite mystery book on THE PLANET OK
. just read it please

This book is one of my all time favorites. I love the plot twists and the ending is great, although I won't spoil it for you. The characters have a lot of personality, the book is funny, and it keeps you turning the pages every time you read it. I really recommend this book to anyone who enjoys unexpected turns, mystery, and basically anybody that enjoys a good book. In my opinion, this is a must-read.

1.5★ (The extra half is because it was a fun idea & the author had honourable intentions)

16 "heirs"stand to inherit the estate of a recently passed rich man, but in order to win, they must compete against each other to decipher a set of "clues" to work out who killed him.

What sounds like a fun & interesting murder mystery is, in my opinion, a disappointing mess. At 200 pages this should have been a quick & easy read, but it was just gruelling & downright boring.

As others have mentioned, keeping track of the 16 characters is a hard ask, especially when they're poorly developed & flat. It's a confusing & disjointed book. Jumping around between characters (virtually in the same paragraph) is just disorientating. I didn't know who was doing what & I just couldn't be bothered even trying to interpret the silly clues. The ending is utterly pointless & the only suspenseful part was when the damn thing was going to end. It's neither clever nor funny. But surprisingly, what nobody seems to have mentioned is the worst sin of all...the writing itself is just awful! Ummm "show, don't tell" anyone?

I realise this is a childhood favourite of a lot of people. I didn't read it as a child so I don't have the warm & fuzzy nostalgia of many other reviews (sorry!), it also means I'm probably bit more objective & I think even I would have realised how poorly it was written even then. How on earth this book won a prestigious children's book award is beyond me.

This one is going on my list of contenders for worst book of the year...

Oh no wait... that dubious honour goes to Salingers "Franny & Zooey" & aint nothing going to knock that off the perch.

I checked out this audiobook on a whim when I saw that it was available, because it seemed like a quick, fun nostalgia read. I remember being assigned to read this book in fifth grade or sixth grade, and had fond memories of it as a brief, fun little puzzle of a story.

The Westing Game begins when sixteen people are called to the abandoned Westing mansion to hear the will of Sam Westing, recently deceased millionaire industrialist. In his will, Westing proposes a game: the sixteen people (his “heirs”) will be divided into teams of two and given a handful of clues, which they must use to figure out who murdered Westing. The team that wins inherits his entire fortune.

Honestly, on re-reading this, I realize that it’s basically Saw for the elementary school set: rich eccentric dude brings a group of strangers together and proceeds to psychologically torture them by a) teasing them with the chance to win an outrageous fortune and b) convincing them that someone in their group is a murderer. Plus there’s puns and puzzles based on patriotic songs!

In short, this has not aged well. Maybe people were more open to the idea of a rich guy fucking with people’s lives for shits and giggles back when the book was originally published in 1979, but reading The Westing Game in the year of our lord 2018 was a significantly different experience for me. Watching all of these people go through what was basically an elaborate parlor game to appease the whims of a rich dead asshole wasn’t very fun, at all, and it was a genuine disappointment for me when at the end it turns out that not only was Westing alive the entire time, none of the characters ever take him to task for how thoroughly he disrupted their lives for his own amusement.

And it’s not just the general plot that left a bad taste in my mouth – there are a lot of little things that I definitely didn’t realize were problematic when I read the book as a kid. A child with mental disabilities is described by a character as “a mongoloid child”; a Chinese woman’s inner thoughts are written in broken English; and the one black character wears traditional African clothing once, but those are all the details about it we get, since no country or other information about her clothes are provided, aside from a character calling her outfit “ethnic” and the narration describing her as looking like “an African princess.” Oof. Oh, and since one of the characters has Down’s Syndrome, listening to the audiobook meant having to listen to a non-disabled voice actor do an impression of a person with a speech impediment, which…was not fun for me. I mean, I don’t know how else they were supposed to do it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to listen to.

this is what i am going to do: i am going to take a red panda, and i am going to learn genetics and i dunno - neuroscience. and welding. and i am going to take a little bit of my brain, and a little bit of everyone's brain here on goodreads.com (you'll be asleep, you wont feel a thing) and then i am going to moosh it all together, and put it in the brain of the red panda. and then i will have the perfect book-recommending resource. because if i had had one of these when i was little, then it would have told me, "you love peggy parrish and her wordplay-based mysteries and you have seen the movie clue enough times that you can recite the whole thing (still can). here's a book you will like". i would have to fine tune it so it works better than the one they have on amazon.com or netflix.com (because, no, i would not like to see the aviator, thank you). i would have loved this book like crazy as a kid. as a grown up, i liked it very much, but thought the characters could have used a little fleshing out to make them more defined. the child-me would not have cared. now i have to go write 250 academic words about it. so much less fun than mad scientisting.

come to my blog!

I think I first read The Westing Game in third or fourth grade. I checked it out of a public school library in Missouri. I loved it, returned it, and checked it again a few months later on another weekly library visit. Two things: 1. Why should children only go to the library once a week? My education would have been brighter and fuller had I just stayed in the library. Other kids could have had more time with the restroom pass, but instead I hoarded that thing and sat on the white raised seat reading away. I'm sure my teacher must've been concerned over my restroom needs/habits. 2.I loved Turtle, the girl with the braids that beg to be pulled. I braided my hair like Turtle's and liked whirling around and using them as weapons against boys coming in for the kisschase win. Which was a good development because a couple of years earlier I bit Rashad Ware when he lumbered towards me for a smooch. (I told my parents that I didn't bite him; just was running with my mouth open and happened to want to close it when his arm showed up)

Back to the book. Still, years later, in love with Turtle, only the mother in me now has room to love Flora Baumbach, hair braider, as well. And Mrs. stickyfingers Hoo, my new favorite. So, still in love with the book. The whizzbang puzzle mystery abides, only the clues are not as mysterious and I did wish that purple waves meant something really, really sinister and twisted. But that's just my maturity showing. So great to be grown up.
This was a sister book club pick. My youngest sister had never read it; apparently, an epic fail in my big sister job on that one. But, it's good to see that I did well enough a job that she knew to find it herself and suggest it for book club. I've helped raise a responsible adult. Even if she liked Crow, the woman in black.
My middle sister took a long time, too long of a time, to read this book. But she finished, liked it, and all is well.
This would be a great family read aloud book. But, to stop my eldest from reading ahead I would have to hide it really well. Maybe even have clues. And a wax dummy dead body! Long live the Westing Game.

Cleanliness:

Sexual Content - 9 Incidents: “Theo nodded, awed by the beautiful Angela, three years older than he, so fair-skinned and blonde, so unattainable.” A fiance gives a kiss on the cheek. Someone thinks they have a splinter in their fanny. A woman is wearing a “tight-fitting silk gown slit high up her thigh.” At a bridal shower, the bride has “bride-to-be-jitters and people giggle. A woman clasped a note to her bosom. “Try not to stick your fanny out so far.” “What a spectacle she made, her wide rear end sticking out.” A woman clutches a treasure to her bosom.

Violence - 2 Incidents: “They say his body is sprawled out on a fancy Oriental rug, and his flesh is rotting off those mean bones, and maggots are creeping in his eye sockets and crawling out his nose holes.” A man is trying to scare several kids over a dare. “And the worms are crawling in and out of the dead man’s skull, in and out of his ear holes, his nose holes, hi mouth holes, in and out of all his holes.” (Said trying to scare someone).

Profanity
Mild Obscenities & Substitutions - 2 Incidents: H*llfire, she'll go to h*ll
Anatomical Terms - 1 Incident: Scr*wy
Religious Profanities - 10 Incidents: What in heaven's name, thank the Lord, goodness, Gee, for heaven's sake, good Lord

Conversation Topics - 9 Incidents: Smoking is mentioned. This is a mystery so several characters are shady: one is a bookie, one a burglar, and one a bomber. Halloween is mentioned and a character is getting a witch’s costume. A character has a silver cross to ward off vampires. A wife deserts her husband and although the husband “obtained a divorce, he never remarried.” Drinking, alcoholic beverages and a brewery are mentioned a few times. One character gets very drunk (not portrayed positively). Mentions a soothsayer that predicted his own death. It is rumored that a character’s daughter committed suicide to avoid marrying. “Sam Westing manipulated people, cheated workers, bribed officials, stole ideas, but Sam Westing never smoked or drank or placed a bet. Give me a bookie any day over such a fine, upstanding, clean-living man.”

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What clever, intricately-plotted fun this was! How did I miss it when I was 11?

While my daughter's 6th grade ELA teacher and classmates were intent on solving the mystery themselves by analyzing clues and pooling ideas, I was content to let the imaginative puzzle unfold without any active sleuthing on my end. Either way makes for an enjoyable read!

I was impressed with the level of character development at work throughout the book. Raskin employs several devices to characterize the players, my favorite of which was the "position" notation on the delivery slips when each heir signed to indicate receipt of their clues or a meeting announcement. It was interesting to note how life events, personal accomplishments and uncertainty affected each player's self-perception and confidence level.

I also appreciated the accessible information about adult matters like stock trading, business management/marketing and courtroom procedure. My daughter didn't realize she was learning while having such a great time; I love it that literature can be sneaky about educating us.

An entertaining mystery for all ages.

It was really hard to read this at first - so many characters are thrown at you all at once, and I felt like I needed to study and take notes to keep track of everything. That being said, about halfway through it really starts to pickup and become interesting. The prose is pretty humorous, as a sort of dry, dark humour seems to permeate throughout the text. The mystery and resolution thereof is pretty clever, although I did figure some of it out. (I'm smart, SMRT!) Not all of it though, and the parts I didn't predict were fun to discover.

I do think I will need to read it a few more times to truly appreciate it, but I am not sure when I will take the time to re-read it. I definitely need to. It's worth a read if you like mystery and/or dark,dry humour.

O and one comment - I did find it impossibly hard to believe that the real estate agent convinced all of these people specifically to purchase the apartments that they did. That part was where I feel the story really fell short.

Author Ellen Raskin sounded more interesting in the introduction by Ann Durell than almost all of her characters. Turtle Wexler was a hoot, but the rest were pretty flat, there were too many of them and their relationships to each other and magnate Sam Westing (making them heirs) took way too long to discern. Many reviewers have compared this to Agatha Christie, but I don't see it, except possibly for the book's basic premise.

This was a fun and quick read that shows what working together can accomplish.

I just want to cut to the chase: the last three chapters, over the course of about nine pages, are some of the most moving I've read in a book written for kids. life, loss, death; growing up and getting old; compassion and empathy; sadness and mourning, sweetness and light. it's all there. such a generosity of spirit from Ellen Raskin. I would have loved to have known her. but I sorta feel I do, from those few pages.

n  n

the book itself is a delightful lark. a lot of fast-paced fun, but with a surprising depth of emotion and a perfect understanding of human nature. I particularly enjoyed the diversity of its cast, the cleverness of its puzzles, the sardonic humor, why the scar happened and what it means, and especially mean little Turtle and her deepening friendship with the woman she decides to call Baba.