We need to make ZKS an acronym. Sure, Zilpha Keatley Snyder is no longer with us and she would never have had the popularity of SJM but I think we need to recognise her as the patron saint of weird girls who play imaginary games. The Egypt Game was published in 1967, a year before I was born, but when I read it it felt totally current to me. I think one reason for that is that it has a very diverse cast of characters for its time but another reason was that Zilpha Keatley Snyder got it. She got how a game of paper dolls can be as complex and imaginatively rich as prestige TV. She got how games can take on a life of their own. This is the story of two eleven year old girls who bond over their love of games and their fascination with ancient Egypt. April is having a rough patch in life— her mom is a Hollywood wannabe who basically abandoned her with her grandmother in Berkeley. In her grandmother’s building she meets her new best friend Melanie who encourages her to be herself and not try so hard to be cool all the time. This is April trying to look like her mother and wear the fashions of 1967. Melanie convinces her not to wear her false eyelashes to school which I think was a public service. So these girls start geeking out on ancient Egypt. They find a bust of Nefertiti in the backyard of a weird old creepy antique shop and they weave a complex game of pretend around it. Melanie’s four year old brother Marshall and his stuffed octopus get involved and so does their younger neighbour and two of the most popular boys in the sixth grade class. And now you may be wondering: are there any adults supervising them while they’re playing in the creepy backyard of the antique shop in a shed? No, because this is the era when adults did not supervise kids playing outside. Does this mean that child prèdätors were not a thing in 1967? Also no. Halfway through the book a child in the neighborhood gets ùnalived and all the kids are kept inside for a while which really annoys them. April and Melanie have a conversation about the prédãtor and why they would do what they did and that conversation reveals that kids back then were not naive. they knew as well as kids now what was going on. ZKS was not afraid to go from coziness to darkness in her books— all her books have dark elements. This picture shows the kids having a ceremony for the ded, namely Petey the parakeet who fell v1ctïm to a cat. April has a close call with the prèdåtor, which leads to his capture and we find out that the prēdátor is not the weird kind of creepy antique shop owner, the way the adults in the neighborhood thought because they just assumed that anybody who was weird must be problematic. But in ZKS books the weirdos are the heroes. Reading this as an adult I love the complexity of the characters, I love that nobody is a stereotype. Whenever anybody says that kids’ books are simplistic I wanna point them toward books like this and Harriet the Spy and The Mixed-Up Files of of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler. My childhood library had a big section of ZKS books. And yes I had my own version of the Egypt Game. I actually got this at an antique store in Manhattan. Did you?