wjreadsbooks 's review for:

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

3.0

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Well, I'm certainly not the ideal target audience for The Westing Game since it's actually intended for middle-schoolers. I also didn't grow up reading this book, so there's no nostalgia factor for me. All I can say is that while the puzzles were interesting and it's probably quite accurately marketed as a sort of Knives Out for children, that I found that plot a little less satisfying than I'd hoped.

Who were these people, these specially selected tenants? They were mothers and fathers and children. A dressmaker, a secretary, an inventor, a doctor, a judge. And, oh yes, one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake. Barney Northup had rented one of the apartments to the wrong person.

Sixteen people have been approached to rent apartments at Sunset Towers, a beautiful new building that happens to be north of the Westing estate. That's right, they've been approached by a mysterious individual and it turns out that they also happen to the heirs of Samuel W. Westing, who has been recently found dead in his estate. Old Man Westing was an eccentric millionaire, who came from nothing and made his fortune in paper products. And now he has gathered his supposed heirs to play a final game to inherit his massive fortune.

I liked the idea of a mystery for middle-schoolers where the readers have to piece together the puzzle to find out why Westing had chosen these people specifically, which this book certainly was. However, I found that sixteen is too many characters to keep track of and I had a tendency to get confused about them, especially since they tended to off on tangents of their own.

Spoiler

Each pair of heirs have been given a set of words to try to figure out what Westing's thinking, but the words all differed and they each had different interpretations of how they were supposed to act on them. This meant that there were various subplots to keep tracking - Turtle's stock market analysis; random items going missing around the building; conflict between the tenants and so on.