The Egypt Game

[Aubrey]

I'm only 1/2 way through it, but I don't get it. It's dry, dated, &...weirdly inappropriate. A child-killer in a kids' book? Really?

 

So does anybody like it? Why? Is it worth finishing?

[NanceXToo]

Hm. I just reserved this one at the library, planned to start it this week. Will have to see how it goes.

[Vida Winter]

I agree - it's creepy. Not for us.

[Jenny in Florida]

I LOVED that book as a kid, and I read it aloud to my daughter when she was five or six. I don't remember either being weirded out by the murder. And it didn't seem to bother my daughter much, either.

 

Neither of us liked the sequel, The Gypsy Game, as much, but The Egypt Game is an enduring favorite here.

[DianeW88]

LOVED it as a kid. My fifth grade teacher read it out loud in class and I read it out loud to my kids, too. They had no problem with the material, and honestly, I didn't even remember the child murderer part of it, so it clearly never bothered me as a child. It all ends well.

[Jen500]

LOVED it as a kid. My fifth grade teacher read it out loud in class and I read it out loud to my kids, too. They had no problem with the material, and honestly, I didn't even remember the child murderer part of it, so it clearly never bothered me as a child. It all ends well.

 

:iagree:

My fifth grade teacher read this aloud too, and I loved it. What a great year... she also read aloud The Bridge to Terabithia, Tuck Everlasting, Shel Silverstein, The Westing Game...

[melissel]

I loved that book as a kid too, and DD and I read it last year, and she liked in spite of the creep factor. I think it's worth reading, IMO, and DD and i had some good conversations about it, but if you don't like it, don't bother with it. There are plenty of children's books I don't personally like that I chose not to read aloud.

[caayenne]

I agree with you, but DS9 loved it! My little sister (age 22) gave it to him, and I didn't pre-read it because she told me it was one of her favorite books at that age. She did specifically say that there was nothing scary or weird about it, because DS normally doesn't like books like that at all. So when he told me (after he finished the book, unfortunately) about the whole serial killer thing, my reaction was something like :001_huh:, followed by :glare:.

 

But he and I had a talk about it, and he reassured me that he didn't find it scary, just "a little bit stressful." It was an interesting conversation, because it really made me realize how differently kids see books from the way we see them. I was annoyed that the author felt the need to add unnecessary violence to a children's book, but DS said that because there were no details of the murder and the author didn't focus on that part, he wasn't bothered by it. He also said that it added to the plot in a way, because it created a conflict of sorts for the kids (you can't go out to play with your friends when a serial killer is on the loose), and that it added an element of mystery, which he always enjoys.

 

I read through it quickly, just to see if I needed to run my sister through the wringer :tongue_smilie:, but while it wasn't my kind of book, I can see why my son liked it so much. He loves to make up extremely elaborate imaginative games based upon real ideas, whether from history or fiction books. He identifies with the kids in the book because he plays the way they play.

 

Are you reading it aloud, though? Because I have a really hard time reading anything to my kids if I'm not enjoying it. I seem to be incapable of pretending to like a book! :lol:

[helena]

I caught the killer part and skipped it while reading out loud. It really bothered me, and I wanted to stop reading it.

 

I talked to my mom about it and while she agreed the book was a little odd she told me about the summer there was a killer in her town and how it affected kids freedom to play in the neighborhood. That led me to remember the summer of the "night stalker". That summer every thing we kids did had a tinge of terror to it.

 

I guess in the end, I could relate to the book a lot more than I first realized.

I finished the book and we loved it. My girls realized that kids don't just get "taken", they often times are killed too.. This book kind of laid it out there. :sad:

 

Now I have quite a few of her (Z. Snyder) books. I find them at the used book store, and for some reason I can't resist buying them. I'll be pre-reading them.

 

We're currently reading Gone Away Lake and I'm bugged out about how the kids are being sneaky, and they're with a strange man and woman all day on a piece of property full of "gulpers" (kind of like quick sand). :tongue_smilie: OH THE INSANITY!!!

 

I think in the end it's a personal choice. If your feeling off about a book... no apologies.

[Aubrey]

LOVED it as a kid. My fifth grade teacher read it out loud in class and I read it out loud to my kids, too. They had no problem with the material, and honestly, I didn't even remember the child murderer part of it, so it clearly never bothered me as a child. It all ends well.

 

Besides mentioning a serial child-killer, it mentions "finding the body." If it were something else, I'd probably think this was sufficiently vague. But for what it is? Eek!

[Aubrey]

:iagree:

My fifth grade teacher read this aloud too, and I loved it. What a great year... she also read aloud The Bridge to Terabithia, Tuck Everlasting, Shel Silverstein, The Westing Game...

 

Whoa...the only book on that list that I haven't read is Tuck Everlasting (saw the movie & liked that, fwiw), but the rest? I hated them all! :lol:

[Murmer]

I LOVED that book as a child....I do remember the child killer part scaring me but I loved the Egyptian pretend idea. I will someday read it to my children but when I think they are ready for the suspense.

[Aubrey]

I think my son was about 8 or 9 when he read it. He remembers liking it, and not being scared at all.

For kids extremely sheltered, I guess it might be a bit shocking.

 

My concern isn't necessarily "scared" but "ick."

 

Your last comment reads pretty rude. :001_huh: Hopefully that's the internet, because I can't imagine a serial child killer being everyday reading, even for kids whose parents who couldn't give a flip what they read.

[Aubrey]

I read through it quickly, just to see if I needed to run my sister through the wringer :tongue_smilie:, but while it wasn't my kind of book, I can see why my son liked it so much. He loves to make up extremely elaborate imaginative games based upon real ideas, whether from history or fiction books. He identifies with the kids in the book because he plays the way they play.

 

That's what's so disappointing--my kids would love the rest of the plot, imo.

 

I bought it for a dollar at a used bookstore because I'd seen it on the SL list (I think), & later I read a summary somewhere that mentioned the serial killing--or I might have just handed it to them!

 

I'd shelved it, but the other day I needed a quick book to take w/ me somewhere, & I decided to give it a chance. I was reading along, not really enjoying it, but seeing something I thought the kids would adore, & wham! Out of nowhere, a child-killer? Really? I mean, I'd read the summary, so I knew it was coming, but a few chapters in, I found myself thinking--surely they were talking about another book?

 

Are you reading it aloud, though? Because I have a really hard time reading anything to my kids if I'm not enjoying it. I seem to be incapable of pretending to like a book! :lol:

 

No, just pre-reading. :001_smile:

[elegantlion]

I loved it as a kid, haven't read it as an adult. I think the child killer thing went over my head or was appropriate. We had a teen get killed not from us when I was a child. Her cousins lived in our neighborhood and I remember a general fear until they figured out who it was. I don't remember if that was before or after I read the book.

 

I wanted friends who wanted to play Egypt with me. In fact I'd still take some friends like that. :D

[Aubrey]

I think in the end it's a personal choice. If your feeling off about a book... no apologies.

 

If it weren't for the fact that it was a Newbery Honor book & on the SL list, I'd just skip it. Actually, I wouldn't have been likely to try it in the first place--not my style.

 

But if there's something in it that gets better, that I'm missing, that makes it worth pushing through, I'm interested to hear about it. There are plenty of books/poems/etc that I didn't like on the first go-through, but w/ the help of someone who DID love it, I saw something good, too. :001_smile:

[helena]

I think my son was about 8 or 9 when he read it. He remembers liking it, and not being scared at all.

For kids extremely sheltered, I guess it might be a bit shocking.

 

I don't think it's just sheltered kids... mine are incredibly sensitive to stories where kids die. I thought they were going to claw me when Ramo died in Island of the Blue Dolphin. :001_huh:

 

They're far from sheltered from death. Unfortunately.

Edited October 3, 2011 by helena

[Jen500]

Whoa...the only book on that list that I haven't read is Tuck Everlasting (saw the movie & liked that, fwiw), but the rest? I hated them all! :lol:

 

:lol:

I did Tuck Everlasting and Terabitha as read alouds w/my dc and loved the books again...but I could not make it through the Westing Game...so many characters to keep track of. I finally told the kids to finish it on their own. I loved it in 5th grade though!

[caayenne]

I understand how you feel. If I had known the serial-killer thing was in the book ahead of time, there is no way I would have handed the book to DS. I think our culture is becoming really desensitized to violence and killing, and I feel that many times an author (or writer if you're talking movies or television) will just add in a murder as an easy plot device. Having read a few too many books where the characters are suddenly in danger for no other reason than to make the book more "exciting," I try to avoid those for my kids as much as possible.

 

If you want to skip this one, you should. There are so many awesome books out there for kids. They won't suffer for not having read one specific book.

Edited October 3, 2011 by caayenne
typo

[Aubrey]

:lol:

I did Tuck Everlasting and Terabitha as read alouds w/my dc and loved the books again...but I could not make it through the Westing Game...so many characters to keep track of. I finally told the kids to finish it on their own. I loved it in 5th grade though!

 

I read Terabithia as an adult. The story was fine, but the ending--I don't do senseless endings like that very well. I think people find them poignant, & maybe they are, but they make me feel like a cheated child. *I* don't see anything redeeming about it, but obviously lots of people do...I can't get past my own knee-jerk emotional response. I feel like the author should be strung up. :lol:

 

But I've read at least one other Paterson book--Jacob Have I Loved--&...well...I don't like her books. :001_huh::tongue_smilie:

[Caitilin]

I loved this one as a child, though I agree about the datedness, and I have reread it as an adult, and still enjoyed it. I guess that my view is that it is a bit like Red Ridinghood or other fairy tales--an exploration of real dangers in a metaphorical and/or fictional way. I was never creeped out by the serial killer aspect, either as a child or now as a parent, and I am unable to read books with violence toward children as a major plot point.

 

I think it is a really good book because it explores so many issues in non-preachy ways: friendship, outsiders, safety, family dynamics, sibling relationships, imagination vs. reality, etc, etc. As ever, YMMV. :001_smile:

[Chris in VA]

I liked the pretending, b/c I also made up elaborate games like that--I was "Doreen," the prettiest name I could think of, and my df was "Judy," an equally bewitching name! LOL

 

But the book just jumped the shark too much for me. I'm fine with fantasy violence like in fairy tales or even war violence, but having that violence creep into the realistic setting of the book was way too much for me.

 

And an aside--The Westing Game is the hardest book to read aloud! Too much language play! It's great at the end, tho.

[AuntieM]

I really hated that book. Decided my kids' lives would not be bettered by reading it, crossed off their lists.

 

ETA - Just clarifying why I did not care for the book. I felt the whole killing business unnecessary to introduce to my young kids (second graders at the time, IIRC). Also, I did not like that the kids actually did incantations and worshipped this Egyptian god(dess?) in their vacant-lot temple. We loved studying about Ancient Egypt, and I felt like this book added nothing to the *historical* aspect of our studies. For accompanying literature, I thought Henty's Cat of the Bubastes much better.

Edited October 3, 2011 by AuntieM

[elegantlion]

I also think we need to remember the book was published in 1967, that's the year I was born, 44 years ago. The world felt like a vastly different place, a safer place (real or imagined anyway), and a serial killer could have felt like a far-off monster, scary, but not too realistic to the average American child.

 

I have the book buried somewhere. I'll have to read it now, your review has me intrigued on how I'll perceive it now.

 

Here's a blurb from the author's website on the events of the book.http://www.zksnyder.com/index.html

 

"For example, the beginning seeds of The Egypt Game were sown during my early childhood, as is true of a great many of my books. A fifth grade project on ancient Egypt started me on my "Egyptian period," a school year in which I read, dreamed and played Egyptian. But my dream of Egypt was private and it was my daughter, many years later, who actually played a game very like the one in the story, after I had turned her on to the fascinating game possibilities of a culture that includes pyramids, mummies, hieroglyphic writing and an intriguing array of gods and goddesses. However, the actual setting and all six of the main characters came from my years as a teacher in Berkeley. The neighborhood described in the story, the ethnic mix in the classroom, as well as the murder, were all taken from realities of our years in Berkeley. So, as I tell children who ask me if I ever write "true" stories, all of my stories have bits-and-pieces of truth--true events, true people, true facts, as well as true memories and even true dreams (the real sound-asleep kind). But the fun comes from what goes on in-between and around and over the bits-and-pieces, tying them together and making them into a story. The inbetween substance is woven of imagination and that is what makes fiction fascinating, to write as well as to read."

[KidsHappen]

I haven't actually read the book but it was required reading for both of my girls in middle school (6th grade I believe) and they both loved it. I have a copy of it around here somewhere. I guess I will have to break it out and give it a look.

[Carol in Cal.]

I LOVED it as a kid. But we didn't study world history, and so anything about Egypt was unbelievably exotic and fascinating to me.

 

I thought that it was loosely based on Stanford--the university town, the ethnic mix, the references to demonstrations, the apartments. It was interesting to read that it referred to Berkeley instead. To me, having been in both places a lot, it 'reads' more like Stanford. Which brings me to another thing that I LOVED about it. It took place in California, nearby. That was pretty much unheard of when I was avidly reading my way through the bulk of pretty good children's literature.

 

I liked the way the characters had a little freedom but not that much. Most other children's books have no real restrictions on the kids, which was inconsistent with my own experience.

 

I thought the serial killer was frightening, but not as much so as the message to 'look under the throne of Set'.

 

It was well-written, and had kids with different family situations that they were dealing with, and it showed the dynamics of modern elementary and middle school relationships pretty well--again, this was unusual and refreshing in my reading at the time.

 

For all of those reasons, I still like the book but I don't recommend it as highly as I used to, because a lot of what I loved about it is no longer as noteworthy or unique. I still gave it to DD, but not until she was in 4th or 5th grade. She did love it!

 

ZKS has written many good children's books. My other faves are "Black and Blue Magic", "The Changling", and "The Red Velvet Room".

[MrsBasil]

I own it, but haven't read it. I'm inspired to pull it out though. I loved "The Changeling" as a tween, but lost my copy years ago. The last time I looked used copies were quite expensive. Wonder if that's still the case?

 

I did love "The Westing Game", but think it would make a horrible read aloud.

[Aubrey]

ZKS has written many good children's books. My other faves are "Black and Blue Magic", "The Changling", and "The Red Velvet Room".

 

I read B&B Magic as a kid! We owned almost NO kids' books, & this was mom's when she was little. It took a couple of desperate tries to really get into it, but I do remember liking it. Not a favorite, but sticks with you in a strange kind of way.

 

Thank you for your review--good explanation & conclusion. I doubt I'll finish EG then. It does read like it was ground-breaking for its time, but you're right--there are other books now that do similar things. :001_smile:

[In the Rain]

I see you've already decided not to finish reading it, but I'll toss in my opinion anyhow.

 

My 10yo dd is very sensitive, but she Egypt Game! She ranks it right up there with Little Women and Carry On, Mr. Bowditch. :lol: The murder didn't bother her because "it wan't talked about much". She felt it contributed to the story, and shouldn't have been left out.

 

I think it was kind of creepy for them to pretend to worship gods, but that is my opinion as an adult. I played deep imaginary games when I was a child, and now my girls do too. I think that is part of why dd liked the book so much.

[Little Nyssa]

I like the book because it is about kids who are fascinated with Egypt and do all kinds of playing and researching about, but I have hesisitated to introduce it to my own kids because of the killer-- it's a small part of the story, but I wish that it were not in there.