The Egypt Game

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The Egypt Game The daughter of an aspiring actress-singer, April Hall lives with her grandmother Caroline in Berkeley. She makes friends with Melanie Ross, a classmate who, like her, is fascinated by archaeology, particularly Ancient Egypt. Along with Melanie's little brother Marshall, they begin a sustained imaginative game about Egypt, later joined by three other neighborhood children, Elizabeth, Toby and Ken. The children research actual Egyptian belief systems and practices, and create rituals intended to reproduce them more or less authentically. Their play area is a seemingly disused storage yard behind an antique/gift shop owned by a strange, reclusive man the kids call "the professor". Someone is murdering children in the neighborhood, and "the professor" is a suspect because he is a loner who keeps to himself; also, because his shop sells things at considerably lower prices than the local variety store. The Egyptians are forced to stay close to home for several months. When they do return, they devise an oracle connected to Thoth, and are unnerved by some of its answers. . When the murderer's identity is discovered, "the professor" reveals that he has been watching the children's play all along, because they made him feel young again, and because they were using fire in some of their rituals. He gives the children the keys to the storage yard, which they had previously accessed by slipping through a loose board in the yard's fence. Although the children feel that the Egypt game cannot continue because its essential property of secrecy (or at least their perception of its secrecy) has been destroyed, the book ends with one of the children raising the possibility of a new game involving Gypsies. Snyder followed up on this possibility by writing The Gypsy Game in

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