#Ellen raskin movie

They are paired up and given sets of clues and a sum of money that they can use in any way they like in the service of finding out who killed Mr. In children’s novels, someone is always solving a mystery. Westing’s considerable estate, but first they have to solve a mystery. It turns out that they are all potential heirs of Mr. Westing dies, and everyone who lives in Sunset Towers is summoned to the reading of his will. It turns out that the person who financed Sunset Towers and planned the apartments to each person’s liking is a millionaire named Samuel Westing. Should tonight be the night? No? All right.Įnough funny business time to get busy telling you about this nasty, annoying little book. I haven’t gone off on a tirade about man books and woman books on this blog for a good eight or nine months. Or maybe it’s the whole man-book and woman-book dilemma. I’m not sure why I’m willing to give Dickens a pass while I rake Ellen Raskin over the coals – perhaps it’s the fact that his world is in some ways strange to me, so I don’t notice how simplistic his characters are, while Raskin’s world is more or less my own world, so I expect more of her. I don’t think they’re great because of his simplistic character-tagging, but I think they transcend this imperfection in a way that allows me to overlook it. The characters in this novel are all ridiculous, overwrought caricatures, although as I type this statement I realize that Raskin draws these characters using more or less the same techniques that Dickens uses, and while I sometimes roll my eyes at Dickens a little, mostly I think his novels are great.

The apartments are also surprisingly inexpensive, and of course each individual and family agrees to move right in. While these people don’t know this at the time, someone has done careful research on their lifestyles and desires and secret fears and has planned the apartment building to appeal to each person and family’s desires. First, a number of individuals and families are given special invitations to move into a new high-rise apartment building called Sunset Towers. Boddy,” The Westing Game follows a similar premise. And while this novel doesn’t have any character with as creepy a name as “Mr. Boddy is murdered, and for the rest of the evening the guests all run around screaming and hiding from each other as they try to figure out who the killer is, and in the process they reveal to each other and to the reader that many of the characters know each other from the past and have a variety of grievances toward each other and toward Mr.

#Ellen raskin movie

Remember the movie version of the board game Clue? All the characters from the board game are invited to a dinner party in Mr. And you know what? My life was better off without it. But as far as I can remember, I never knew that this book existed until this past June, when a parent enrolled his son at the tutoring center where I was working and wanted me to teach a specific middle-school reading course to him in a one-on-one setting. It was written in 1978 and won the Newbery Medal, so one would think either that I would have read it or that I would remember a determined Custer’s-last-stand-style battle to defend my right NOT to read it (cough – Bridge to Terabithia – uncough) against an army of librarians.