The Westing Game

After years and years of listening to my sister go on and on and ON about how great this book is, I had to finally admit that maybe I should read it too. So it entered my "list"...that ever-growing, impossible-to-catch-up-on list that haunts me and overwhelms me (aka: it wasn't ever read). But then this week I was assigned the task of planning an entire thematic unit with two other good friends of mine from class and we decided upon the theme of Mystery (could there be a cooler theme? I think not) and this book seemed to fit perfectly as the centerpiece for my English unit...except I should probably read the book before writing five lessons about it. So read it I did. And I couldn't put it down. Well...I did put it down at times, but only because I had to be doing big girl things like sleeping and eating and going to work. But I immediately became fully engrossed in the plot and the characters and the complex but extremely interesting mystery elements. There are so many twists and turns and vital pieces of information that the author has purposefully kept from you the reader just as she has kept them from the characters themselves. The basic, brief plot overview is this: sixteen hand-chosen people become the participants in a Clue-like game, the object of which is to determine who killed Sam Westing (the man running the game from the grave) and receive his millions. Needless to say...it's a good one. And highly, highly recommended by me (and...everyone else who's read it). I had to force myself to just simply read the book rather than take notes during the whole thing, though, about how I'm going to use it in my unit. Now that I'm done, let the note-taking commence. I'm pretty excited; stay tuned for an update on that.