My classic children's genre novel for May is a real eye-opener. I hadn't heard of either the book or the author before doing research for this project but that seems all the more shocking now that I've read it. I will absolutely follow up with its belated sequel, 'The Gypsy Game', published three decades later in 1997, but I'll seek out other works by Zilpha Keatley Snyder too, because, based on what she wrote here and where her foreword suggests it came from, she seems like a person I'd have liked to have known and a writer I'd very much like to read.

She was an American author, who lived from 1927 to 2014 and taught at schools in many states. She started writing in the sixties and apparently mixed realism with the supernatural across a strong output of forty-six children's books that included three Newbery Honor titles, this being the first. Clearly, she brought a deep understanding of children's behaviour to her writing and that's particularly overt in this book, which may not have served as a direct influence on then future inventions like roleplaying games and LARPs but formalised them nonetheless in ways that seem utterly prescient.

In one sense, the story is utterly grounded in realism. It's set in a small but unnamed university town in California and a highly diverse multilingual neighbourhood. The primary characters are all children and young ones too. They represent a wide swathe of ethnic backgrounds and none of them come from well-to-do families. Most have missing parents, either through death or just wanton neglect. And, if all that isn't shocking enough for a 1967 children's book, there's a fresh strand of plot introduced a third of the way in that seems rather out of place in this framework, which is of course much of the point.

The lead is April Dawn, who's eleven or twelve and new in town. She lived in Hollywood with her mother Dorothea, a singer and struggling actress, but she's been sent to live with her grandma (her father's mother). Dorothea doesn't write often and, when she eventually does, it's to tell her daughter that, by the way, she just got married again. She's an awful parent, which is likely why April has found her own escape. She likes odd stuff, so wears false eyelashes, and old stuff, because she wants to be an archaeologist. Fortunately the A-Z Antiques store that sells curios and used merchandise is right next door to their apartment in the Casa Rosada, even if it's run by a sinister older gentleman with deep sunken eyes who's enigmatically called the Professor.

It's at the Casa Rosada that she meets Melanie and Marshall Ross, who are black and live with their parents in a nearby apartment. Melanie is of similar age to April and they quickly become fast friends, but Marshall is notably younger, only four, which is why he carries a plush octopus called Security (surname likely Blanket) wherever he goes. Melanie enjoys cutting people out of newspapers and magazines, forming them into new imaginary families then making stories up about them. It's a pastime that April happily joins.

The Egypt Game begins with just the three of them, after they stumble onto a courtyard at the back of the Professor's store, hidden behind a loose plank in a fence. April has devoured a host of books on Egyptology and so the replica bust of Nefertiti she finds there sparks a new game, one that has been rightly described in scholarly literature as being an antecedent to RPGs like 'Dungeons & Dragons'. I also feel that it serves as a precursor to LARPing, given that it goes a step beyond imaginative games on a tabletop.

In short, they design their characters, Marshall becoming young pharaoh Marshamosis (though it's consistently misspelled as "pharoah" in my Dell Yearling copy). April and Melanie become Bastet and Aida respectively, two evil high priestesses of Set who want to sacrifice him to their crocodile gods. They invent rituals and ceremonies and then perform them together. They craft costumes to wear while doing so. They speak to each other using their character names or via a secret language they've conjured up out of imaginary hieroglyphics.

And, crucially, they create strands of story out of things around them. When Petey, Elizabeth's parakeet, is killed by a neighbourhood cat, he becomes Pete-ho-tep and they design and enact a ritual funeral ceremony, even mummifying the body and laying it to rest under a makeshift pyramid. When their sixth grade teacher teaches them about oracles, that sparks a multi-day adventure that evolves into asking questions of their oracle and waiting until the next day to see what answer is provided. That offers surprises because they're answered twice and that's not something they can easily explain.

As games tend to do, this one grows. When Elizabeth Chung moves into the Casa Rosada with her mother, she soon joins in as Neferbeth, even though she's a couple of years younger than April and Melanie. After they sneak away from their trick or treating on Halloween (for which they've naturally dressed up in Egyptian garb), their game is gatecrashed by a couple of boys from their class, Ken Kamata and Toby Alvillar, who end up joining in, even though these girls know that boys are icky. Elizabeth and Ken are Asian and Toby is of gypsy heritage. Elizabeth's father and Toby's mother have both died, leaving their children to be raised by single parents.

No wonder they choose to escape, though the imaginative games begin with Melanie, who has both parents intact. And here's where that surprising strand of plot comes in, because it's the sort of thing that everybody in town wants to escape. We're a third of the way into a children's story, with none of the primary characters over the age of maybe twelve and the grim realism of their lives avoided through escape into a fantasy world they create for themselves and then enhance and maintain. Then we learn about the serial killer and our eyes go wide.

Apparently, a little girl has been killed, but the adults around our characters remember that a year earlier a little boy disappeared. Therefore, there must surely be a serial killer active in town and nobody's safe. It isn't just the Egypt Game that's put on hold at that point, because everyone's brought indoors and supervised as much as possible. Of course, time changes that, even if nobody is caught, and the kids can get back to Egypt, as they've named the Professor's courtyard, merely with this news hanging over the town like the sword of Damocles, especially with the Professor being considered by the townsfolk as a prime suspect.

Snyder is careful to wrap up all of these plot strands, Egypt and the Professor and the killer, in suitably adventurous style, reserving some very good moments for Marshall, who's easily the youngest member of the cast. She also sets the stage for the sequel, even though it turned out to be a very long time coming. "Melanie," April says in the last line of the book. "What do you know about gypsies?" After all, they've done about everything they can in Egypt and so it feels like time for a new game. And, if that isn't the truest way to end a prescient look at what later became an entire gaming industry, I don't know what is. ~~ Hal C F Astell