***Wanda’s Summer Carnival of Children’s Literature***This book is one of the reasons that I love mysteries so much as an adult! I read it when I was 9 or 10 and I distinctly remember that it scared the pants off me!It had just the right amount of creepiness for that age—a potentially sinister man whose storage yard that the children choose to play in, a secret club that they have to protect from children who wouldn’t appreciate the intricate Egypt game, and a murderer roaming the town and makin...

I loved this as a kid. Zilpha was one of my favorite authors in the 80s. There was John Bellairs, Judy Blume and Zilpha Synder. Back then I couldn't even say her name. Headless Cupid was my favorite book back then. This was another great of hers.A group of neighborhood children find a building with fun stuff where they come up with a game about Egyptian gods and goddesses. They set up alters and even an oracle. The game gets real when they start getting real answers back. As a kid, I remember th...

Re-read. I remember playing the same paper doll game that the girls did. Still have them.**Read for summer reading program — “award winning book”.

This is another Newberry Honor book that my son and I are reading together. I enjoyed it and thought it was a fun story. It starts out with two girls and their little 4 year old brother that love "Egyptology" so they create their own imaginative game to play in secret. As they bring new kids with new ideas, into their club including even a couple of boys, The Egypt Game evolves and takes on a life of its own.The book highlights that its ok for kids of different races to intermix; that boys and g...

I loved this book as a kid. I recently learned there's a sequel, so I decided to re-read the Egypt Game before I read the sequel. I was worried that it wouldn't hold up to my childhood memories. I was especially concerned that the way the kids treat different cultures might come across as flat or awkward or, frankly, xenophobic or bigoted. I'm a lot more sensitive about that stuff these days. I won't champion this book as a bastion of cultural diversity, but I think it was okay / good enough in

I already had a sort of Egypt fixation when this book was read to me for the first time in 3rd grade. But this book took that fixation to a whole new level. For years, I read it over and over again. It...affected me. Because it implied that I wasn't the only dorky, bespectacled youth out there pouring over books about the mummification process (they pulled the brain out through the nose? awesome!), requesting that their mother construct 3D pyramind birthday cakes, and naming the neighbor's stray...

When I first came across this book in 1975, I was seven years-old and was totally into everything ancient Egypt. I'd seen the King Tut exhibit twice, read everything both fact and fiction about the civilization and was so geeky that I tought myself to write in hieroglyphics (which was fun when it came to passing secret messages). Imagine my delight when the wonderful librarian at my elementary school (I wish I could remember her name because she helped feed my Egypt fix) gave me this book. I lit...

There are so many things to like about this extraordinary book that I had somehow missed previously. I'm actually not sure if I had read it completely through before, probably because it is another novel that I consider over-assigned in schools.'The Egypt Game' also carries the burden of being dated. It was published in 1967 when kids said "neat" a lot more and had to go to the library to find out about ancient Egypt, instead of looking online. No cell phones here. Of course, that could be viewe...

I had forgotten how obsessed I was with Zilpha Keatley Snyder until we came across this book on the Newbery shelf at the bookstore. Then it hit me with such force I couldn't believe I had forgotten. I was obsessed obsessed. I read this book several times as a kid, and also the Stanley family novels. Re-reading this book with my kids I had such a strong recollection of how it used to feel to me when I read it. I remember thinking that if I just read it again I could somehow crack how to make my o...

It's nice when a childhood favourite holds up decades later. I read this book several times in elementary school when it first came out, and when I started seventh grade I was thrilled to see a huge section of books on Egypt in the highschool library. I proceeded to read a lot of them!Coming back to this book 4 decades later, I noticed a whole plot thread that had zipped over my innocent little head back then. How did I miss the whole serial-child-killer scare that keeps the kids indoors for wee...

Based on Wanda’s excellent review, as well as my own fondness for ancient Egypt, I picked up this young adult book to see what I was missing. I found it reasonably entertaining, although I couldn’t help wishing it was fleshed out a little further.April has been sent to live with her grandmother and she is resenting it. All of that changes when she meets the upstairs girl, Melanie, her precocious four-year-old brother, Marshall, and his adorable stuffed octopus, Security. They start out telling s...

I don't find the murdering of children a fitting, central topic for children's books. On top of that, it's a sad testament to the state of our current culture that the murderer can't even be recognized as a "bad guy." He is labeled as "mentally sick" and is conveyed as more in need of our sympathy than judgement. As if he was the victim and not the two children he murdered or the third he tries to nab. The main character, a girl of ten, has no moral compass and leads her friends into all kinds o...

April goes to live with Grandma, her mum has met someone new and is going away for a bit. April finds is it hard being deserted by her mum but gradually with the help of Caroline her Grandmother and making a new friend of Elizabeth who lives in an apartment in her block she begins to enjoy life and not constantly long go go back to Hollywood. They start a game based on ancient Egypt and soon some others join in. Something bad happens in the neighbourhood and there isn't as much freedom for outdo...

This was my banned book for the WBC challenge. I actually found it buried in a box amongst the Baby-sitters Club, Sweet Valley Twins, A Wrinkle in Time and various other books I collected in my childhood, but I'd never read this one so I decided to pick it up after I saw it listed as a banned book. It was a cute book about a girl named April, who has come to live with her grandmother whom she hardly knows after her flighty actress mother decides to go on tour sans her 11 year old daughter. Lost

The Egypt Game is a perfectly fine book for older kids or young adults. It's fun, it moves along nicely, it has an amazingly multicultural cast that isn't belabored, and there are a few real scares in the book. On the other hand, reading it as an adult, it isn't a lot more. It's a very straightforward story, and most of the ending could have been predicted within the first thirty pages, as long as you also looked at the cover. That is not the end of the world. It merely means it's a good, fun bo...

Another great one from childhood. I have to do a reread as details are foggy. I did not love it as much as The Velvet room and The Changeling but it was still a great little book..plus I love books having anything to do with Egypt!

Zilpha Keatley Snyder is a master of mood, as anyone who's read the evocative and sharp The Witches of Worm can tell you. The Egypt Game has mood going for it in spades; it's just not clear to me what else it has, I'm afraid. This book is a very slow burn, building on its mood gradually to... a not-particularly exciting climax, involving a barely mentioned antagonist with an identity we can't possibly anticipate as readers. It doesn't help that the resolution to a particular mystery is effective...

A Newbury Honor Book? Really? While this was an interesting story, I found the children to not behave in the manner of actual children - speaking wisely beyond their years and with adult emotions - emotions we might like them to have, but that for the most part, they do not. Interesting to note that the NY Times Book Review (quoted on the inside cover) says the author "[presents:] contemporary children as they talk and act on their own." Yeah, I don't think so.The story, whlie interesting, is so...

I was happy with this book. Zilpha Keatley Snyder shows herself to be a writer of the first rank, meting out humor, suspense, and some genuine drama at a nicely maintained pace. The Egypt Game rings with kid-friendly dialogue and characters, effectively camouflaging the author's presence. A good story often seems as though it wasn't written at all, but actually happened, magically appearing on the page as the events occurred. The Egypt Game is one such book. I enjoyed this novel, and would recom...

one of my favorite books of all time. i reread this religiously as a kid. recommended to anyone with a good imagination who's ever found solace in his or her fellow outcasts.