The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
Published 1978 · 45,000 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Mystery & Crime
How hard is The Westing Game to read?
The Westing Game scores 40 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 30 out of 100
- Accessible prose aimed at younger readers, with wordplay and puzzle elements adding intellectual engagement.
- Sentence structure: 25 out of 100
- Abstraction: 25 out of 100
- Concrete puzzle elements and character interactions. Themes embedded in the game structure.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Every detail is a potential clue. Sixteen characters with interlocking secrets create high information density for the length.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- The game structure and hidden identities create significant misdirection throughout.
- Symbolic density: 30 out of 100
- The game itself symbolizes the American competitive ethos. Names carry hidden meanings.
- Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
- Raskin's detached narration and the absurdity of the premise provide gentle ironic distance.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Multiple levels of mystery—the murder, the clues, and Westing's true plan—are resolved in stages.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Sixteen characters, eight teams, multiple rounds of clues. Complex architecture in compact form.
How The Westing Game is regarded
The Westing Game holds a literary regard score of 54 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.