Saturday Pages: The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin!!!

Hey guys!

This week has been a bit complicated and with two weddings, baking, events and work... my reading and my motivation has suffered a bit. And let's not talk about my messed up emotional state. I hoping to pick up my reading and be able to schedule a bit more in advance so I don't feel like I'm running around like a headless chicken.

After a massive book hangover when I finished Ruin & Rising, I wasn't even sure what to read, but then I remembered that I still hadn't read the middle grade classic chosen for The Midnight Garden's Classic's Read-a-long for June, so I decided to give it a try! So happy that I did, cause it was the right book to get me off that massive hangover! Thank you Wendy for suggesting this one! And after talking about it yesterday on the discussion post, today I have is as my Saturday Pages entry!

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Westing Game is one of those classics that I hadn't heard of before the ladies at The Midnight Garden chose it as June's book for the read-a-long. And now that I've read it, I want to quick myself for not having read it a long time back! This is a book that I've loved and that I know a younger me would have adored too!

This is a delightful book, a murder mystery middle grade that is full of social comentary but that never once sounds preachy. That's one of the things that I don't seem to get over too easily on classic books like these, they sound way too preachy for the adult me.

The Westing Game starts with a bunch of new tenants taking their new houses in a new building, and right from the start we see something more is going on. There's a clear Agatha Christie feel to certain parts of the book, but not in a way to feel like it was bothersome and felt like a copy. Not at all, but it just gave you that feel of clever mystery and deep understanding of human nature.

It's a bit hard for most of the book to think of one character as the main character although I'd consider Turtle the main character. She's a young girl, very clever, very brave and with a big tendency to kick shins and to treat her braid as her defining point. She knows about the stock market and deals with lack of emotional connections.

All characters are somehow connected with each other and with Sam Westing, the man that is found dead and that wants his heirs to discover who killed him to claim their inheritance, and there starts the Westing Game. The game not only has us going after red herrings and suspecting people left, right and centre but also serves as a way to show us what makes each character tick and who are these people and what's going on in their lives.

I found myself turning the pages faster and faster, making new theories and throwing them away as some new details were revealed here and there, and I was right suspecting the right guy but I wasn't even close to discovering all that was behind everything!

The ending was great and that little epilogue was the right way to tie everything together and I loved knowing what happened with everyone.

A wonderful classic that I hightly recommend if you haven't read it yet! 5 well deserved stars!



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Friday Reads: Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor!!

This week's second Friday Reads is a book that's in two of my challenges for this year, the 2014 series challenge on Read Sleep Repeat and the 2014 TBR pile challenge on Bookish, and for that one it's also the Read-Along book for January!

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


An absolutely amazing book! I have let this book settle in my mind for a while in the hope that time would allow me to write a more coherent review for this book, but I'm quite afraid that won't be as easy...

I loved this book, I really really loved this book, and read in January it's and will be one of my absolute favourite books of the whole year. I had been postponing reading it and now I feel like kicking myself for it, except that when I think the final book of this trilogy comes out this year, I think the wait was worth to save me long waits between books!

The first thing about this book that grabbed me from the first page was the writing. It is absolutely beautiful and can be lyrical and creepy and so vivid that you feel like you're walking the pages with the characters.

When I went into the book I wasn't very sure what the book was about, I had read a gorgeous novella "Night of Cake and Puppets" on the same world, but I didn't have a clue about what the plot was about, only that Karou could use a sort of magic & wishes. And wow... that is just but a grain of sand compared to what the book really packs! At some point I feared all would end up into a very trite Angels vs Demons rehash, but I should not have doubted Laini Taylor in the least because what she did was simply fantastic.

You really don't know what to expect page after page, and even though you get hints here and there, I must confess though I suspected quite a bit, I wasn't entirely sure I was right and some of the revelations did really manage to surprise me.

The book has two very distinct halves, one where we are introduced to the world, to Karou and her life and we get little glimpses of another world beyond ours, with the wishes, and Karou's blue hair and how she tries to be an art student in Prague and do the errands in search for teeth all over the world. Then winged Akiva appears and the game changes. We start getting some more flashbacks and the final part of the story is Karou trying to find what was really going on and finding out who or what she really is.

The character development was fantastic, I already was madly in love with Zuzana, the rabid fairy and Mik, the violing boy, but properly meeting Karou and going on this journey with her was fantastic and heartbreaking. Akiva was perfect kind of intriguing, dangerous, brooding and conflicted kind of character that Karou needed to push her along.

I just cannot say anymore without risking some spoilers and I don't wanna do that at all, this book is one that is going to be brilliant either way, but I feel that discovering every little nuance of it as it comes up will make it even better!

Now I must go and read the next book, even if it means I'll have the long 3 month wait till the final book comes out!

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a fantastic book, one that I can't recommend enough and that deserves 5 stars (and a few more added to it!).



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