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jamie_bibliotecaria 's review for:
The Westing Game
by Ellen Raskin
This is a really hard one to rate because I love it and it's super compelling and there is nothing else quite like it, but it doesn't hold up as well. Both the narrator and various characters use the word "cripple" over and over and over again, and that's before we even get to the disturbingly childlike presentation of Madam Hoo. Not knowing a language does not make a person think like a child.
There is a dilemma about the roles of women running through the core of the book. Grace Wexler is bored and restless because she's never had enough to so (like another character), she turns to social climbing and is mocked for it. Angela is being rushed into marriage; Flora Baumbach seems to have been deserted by her husband after their late-in-life baby was born with Down syndrome; Sydelle Pulaski is tired of being overlooked as a middle-aged career woman. I'm not sure any of these dilemmas ever would have resonated with the preteens that the book is aimed at but they seem increasingly out-of-date now when most married middle-class women hold jobs.
There is a dilemma about the roles of women running through the core of the book. Grace Wexler is bored and restless because she's never had enough to so (like another character), she turns to social climbing and is mocked for it. Angela is being rushed into marriage; Flora Baumbach seems to have been deserted by her husband after their late-in-life baby was born with Down syndrome; Sydelle Pulaski is tired of being overlooked as a middle-aged career woman. I'm not sure any of these dilemmas ever would have resonated with the preteens that the book is aimed at but they seem increasingly out-of-date now when most married middle-class women hold jobs.