Ready Reference Treatise: The Egypt Game

By Raja Sharma

It is a children’s novel. The major characters in the novel are children. The story is set in a small college town in California. The story revolves around a sustained imaginative game created by children in a storage yard.

April, Melanie, Marshall, and Elizabeth are the four children who are very adventurous and courageous. Being quite fascinated with ancient Egypt, the children create an imaginary world. They live out their own rituals and dramas in their imaginary world that they have created.

Ready Reference Treatise: The Egypt Game
Copyright
Chapter One: Introduction
Chapter Two: Plot Summary
Chapter Three: Major Characters
Chapter Four: Complete Summary
Chapter Five: Thematic Analysis

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raja Sharma
• Release date: Oct 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370611126

Raja Sharma

Raja Sharma is a retired college lecturer.He has taught English Literature to University students for more than two decades.His students are scattered all over the world, and it is noticeable that he is in contact with more than ninety thousand of his students.

Book preview

Ready Reference Treatise: The Egypt Game

Copyright

Ready Reference Treatise: The Egypt Game

Raja Sharma

Copyright@2016 Raja Sharma

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved

Chapter One: Introduction

The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder was first published in 1967. The book won the New Berry Award in the same year.

It is a children’s novel. The major characters in the novel are children. The story is set in a small college town in California. The story revolves around a sustained imaginative game created by children in a storage yard.

April, Melanie, Marshall, and Elizabeth are the four children who are very adventurous and courageous. Being quite fascinated with ancient Egypt, the children create an imaginary world. They live out their own rituals and dramas in their imaginary world that they have created.

Behind the main story concerning the children, something sinister goes on in the novel. There is a child that gets kidnapped and murdered in the neighbourhood, but no one knows who did it. The four children are free to go around, thinking that they are living in their imaginative world. They eventually fall straight into danger. This leads to the children solving the mystery of the child’s murder and disclosing the murderer.

Imagination plays a vital role in the entire novel. The book seems to be conveying a very clear message that learning can be both fun and exciting. The book also says how life can be made thrilling and magical, and age is not the criteria in this.

Chapter Two: Plot Summary

The novel opens in the month of August. Melanie Rose and April Hall are two young girls. They begin to play their games with Melanie’s four-year old brother Marshall and his stuffed octopus Security in the storage yard of a store named A-Z Antiques.

The store sells very old and used things. There is a loose board in the fence of the yard, and the children easily enter through that opening.

The man who owns the store is a mysterious man called The Professor. Most of the children in the neighbourhood are scared of him. Having met The Professor once, April found him and his antique store very interesting.

The children, April, Melanie, and Marshall do their own research of actual Ancient Egyptian belief systems and their practices, and then they create their own imaginative rituals which they intend to reproduce more or less originally.

Elizabeth Chung, a nine-year old Chinese-American girl joins them in the yard. She happens to have come to live in their apartment building with her mother and her two younger sisters. In the game of the children Elizabeth’s name is Neferbeth.

One day, a little girl in the neighbourhood is found to be missing, probably kidnapped. She is later found murdered. It happens to be the second such crime in one year. The parents stop sending their children outside for many weeks.