The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars I guess this is a classic juvenile fiction/mystery but I had never heard of it before. It's about an eccentric millionaire who dies and leaves a group of seemingly random people clues to solve the mystery of his death and thus giving them the opportunity to win his fortune. My fourth grader brought it home as an assignment for his new gifted reading program and said his teacher wanted him to have the first 19 chapters read in two days in order to catch up with the rest of the class. Yikes! So, I decided to read it with him to help him get through it all in time. It was really fun trying to keep track of all the characters and their different traits and clues. There are a lot of characters so we ended up making a chart to keep track of them all. I think I may have spoiled it a little bit for him because we'd stop after every few chapters and discuss our thoughts and predictions and I was able to guess a lot of the plot. He was only supposed to read up to a certain point because they were going to discuss/read the rest in class so when he went to bed I had to finish the book, of course. It was a nice, clean, not-too-scary mystery and perfect for my nine year old. View all my reviews >>