100 Books, #30: The Egypt Game

[osprey_archer]

I love Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s books for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is the fact that she captures the magic of imaginative games. The Changeling does this beautifully too, but her finest book on this score has to be The Egypt Game, which follows new friends April Hall and Melanie Ross as they build a complicated game based on - though swiftly spiraling out from - ancient Egypt.

I love the descriptions of the game, and the book gives them their full due: it describes the backyard of the local antique store that they slowly take over as a stage set for Egypt, the household items that they manage to spruce up into Egypt wear, the way that the game slowly adds new subplots, new characters - and new players - and evolves over the course of its run.

I also love April and Melanie's friendship, which evolves from prickly beginnings into a steadfast thing. April can be difficult and prickly and not so much attention-seeking as attention-demanding; when she and Melanie first meet, April is wearing a massive feather boa, even larger fake eyebrows, and a "I'm from Hollywood and know everything" attitude. She's putting on a front: her feckless mother has just sent her to live with her grandmother, and April feels insecure and unwanted and damned if she's going to show it.

But she and Melanie manage to work past that through their mutual love of story-telling and ancient Egypt. (I suspect that taking care of her little brother Marshall, who is also a rather odd kettle of fish, has given Melanie some extra maturity for her age.)

Another thing I appreciate about Snyder's writing, more now that I'm older and rereading, is how gracefully she incorporates diversity and changing social mores into her stories. Melanie and her little brother Marshall are black, April is white, their neighbor Elizabeth Chung is Chinese-American - and also a lot younger than Melanie and April; I like how the book has a mix of ages - Ken Kamata is Japanese-American (and also kind of a dumb jock type: he can never lose himself in the game but retains always an awareness of how kookie they all look, walking around casting ashes on their heads), and Toby Alvillar is...complicated?

And it all seems very natural. Snyder introduces this diversity so gracefully that it just seems like the way things are in the Casa Rosada, where April and Melanie live, and not at all as if she's teaching a lesson or making a point.

***

This gracefulness is part of why The Egypt Game's belated sequel, The Gypsy Game, so disappointing: where The Egypt Game is light-handed, The Gypsy Game is as subtle as a brick. It would be bad even if it weren't a sequel, but the comparison makes its faults especially glaring. Clearly at some point Snyder realized that making a game about gypsies would be just as bad as making, say, the Jewish Game.

Which is true, but unfortunately social insight alone does not a good novel make. The book becomes not so much a novel as a PSA: a very dull PSA where nothing imaginative happens at all. And when I first read it, in 1997 when the book came out, I was too busy being bitter about its failure as a novel to retain any of its social messages.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Don't know if you'll catch this comment before you leave (but it will be waiting for you when you get back): did you ever read either Black and Blue Magic by her or Season of Ponies (I was barely alive when that first one came out, but I remember liking it, though I can't recall any details about it now, except--balancing bareback?

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I missed them both. Or no, maybe I read Black and Blue Magic? Did the hero have a lot of trouble mastering his powers, and get accidentally taken for an angel? I don't remember it as well as some of her other books, though. I think it was one of the early ones so maybe not as polished.