Raskin’s book is a mystery, and the writing is so engaging that the reader wants to keep reading in order to find out what is happening. For this reason, and for thematic reasons too, the book feels as though it could be for an audience of just about any age. Yes, some of the main characters are children – plaited Turtle, track star Doug, wannabe-writer Theo, and Theo’s disabled but bright, bird-watching brother Chris – but equally, many of the main characters are adults, including the parents of these young people, along with a judge, a podiatrist, a religious cleaning woman, a delivery boy, a secretary, and more. The Westing Game is nominally a children’s book (publisher Puffin notes on the back that it is for ‘ages 10 up’).

Life, too, is senseless unless you know who you are, what you want, and which way the wind blows…God bless you all and remember this: Buy Westing Paper Products!’ This captures the tone of the book the story is both serious and wryly humorous, both philosophical and practical. He closes his list of instructions by noting, ‘Senseless, you say? Death is senseless yet it makes way for the living. With the money and the hints, they are to find out who killed Westing and why. His will sets out a ‘game’: in this game, the heirs are paired up and each pair is given a set of clues and $10,000. In the novel, wealthy industrialist Sam Westing dies, and his will calls for his ‘heirs’ (not relatives but rather a bunch of people whose lives he touched for better or for worse) to meet at his mansion. The book is still in print, and it was made into a play and film, and it is still read both by children and adults, so this leads to the obvious question of ‘why?’ What is it about this book that spoke to the Newbery committee all those years ago and what is it that continues to appeal to readers today? Thirty-five years ago, Ellen Raskin’s novel The Westing Game won the Newbery Medal. Epstein who, in 2014, wrote about The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, a work of children’s literature which won the Newbery Medal following its publication in 1978.

2022 marks ten years since the launch of Wales Arts Review, and as part of our celebrations, throughout this year we’ll be revisiting some of the best and most loved features, interviews, and reviews from our archive of nearly five thousand published pieces.

Book review of the westing game