The Westing Game -- Ellen Raskin, 1979 (read 5-9 June 2007)

This is one of the first books Adam's recommended to me that I've actually read.

I remember coming across this book in elementary school and thinking it looked horribly boring. I was wrong. It's lots of fun! Raskin's writing is engaging and clever; we don't have much time to get to know the many, many characters, but each one stands out as a distinguishable individual.

Clues, red herrings, and surprises come at you fast. I kept thinking I was clever for figuring something out, only to get knocked down a peg for totally misinterpreting something else -- just the way the characters do. Thanks to my omniscient readerly perspective, I got the main point of the mystery much faster than the characters did, but I missed a crucial piece that was obvious to them. (It was available to me, if I had read a little more carefully.)

I didn't find the ending quite satisfying -- there were still too many loose ends I was curious about -- but I've heard there's a sequel.

The Perilous Gard -- Elizabeth Marie Pope, 1974 (read ~31 May-3 June 2007)

A wonderful book! Not entirely surprising, since it's a Newbery Honor book. It's based on the Scottish ballad of Tam Lin, and I enjoyed it much more than Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, which is based on the same legend. This is saying a lot, since I'm quite a Jones fan.

Kate, the heroine, is an interesting person, someone I can identify with. All the characters seem like people I'd enjoy talking to. A good book, of course, may or may not have characters like this, but it definitely was pleasant.

I did keep noticing two flaws in the book:

• Pope used Tudor period details well, displaying the results of what must have been plenty of research without including a single historical detail that didn't seem necessary at the time. Even Kate's thoughts were backed up with details about her upbringing in and around Tudor royal courts, and her personal exposure to a few of the great thinkers of the period. Still, her thought processes often seemed too modern, even post-modern. In particular, her conclusions about the clash between Christian and pagan lifestyles felt too much like Marion Zimmer Bradley to be believable in a Tudor lady-in-waiting. They were very nicely disguised as period-appropriate thoughts, though.
  
• In a few places, I found it too easy to predict what was about to happen -- particularly just before the very end.
  

These problems were far outweighed, however, by my favorite thing about this book: It has an ending that's exactly right. It's so unusual for an ending to be satisfying! Usually the book stops before it really seems done; less often, there's a real denouement, but it doesn't happen at all the way I wanted it to. This book is one of perhaps five or ten I've read with truly satisfying endings.