Last month, my classic children's genre novel was 'The Egypt Game' by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, a pioneering book that built an adventure out of gameplaying, presaging the rise of roleplaying games and LARPs in succeeding decades. That was published in 1967, hence classic—I'm reading books over fifty years old for this project—, but this was a much belated sequel. It starts at the exact point its predecessor ends, but it didn't arrive for three decades, eventually showing up in 1997. While it seems to aim to repeat the formula, it emphatically doesn't and that could be either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you take it.

Initially, it's absolutely a repeat. This memorable band of multi-racial kids of varied ages have played the Egypt Game and decide to move onto another game instead. April Dawn throws out a new idea: let's play the Gypsy Game! Melanie Ross is quickly in. And so's her younger brother Marshall, at least once he realises that gypsies have trained bears. So's Elizabeth Chung, even though she doesn't know what a gypsy is. Ken Kamata's gone skiing with his family, so we don't know if he'll be in or not. April thinks Toby Alvillar won't be, but it turns out that he's an actual gypsy. Well, he's a quarter gypsy, because his dad's mum was one, born in Romania.

It's fair to point out here that I was very wary going into this book. Even as I read in 'The Egypt Game' that the next game would be the Gypsy Game, I saw the many pitfalls that Snyder could easily fall into tackling that topic. She may or may not have fallen into them in 1967 but this was 1997 and those pits are much bigger and much more dangerous and might even have magnets in the bottom to draw us in. It's a very difficult subject to tackle, especially in a children's book. So, as this built in utter stereotypes, I had major sinking feelings.

Those sinking feelings went away around the ten-page mark, because it's a careful pivot. Until that point, it's all stereotypes. Gypsies are characterful people who wear colourful clothes and lots of jewellery, live on the road in majestically painted caravans, tell fortunes and teach bears how to dance. What glorious fun! However, once we get to that point, the girls pop down to the local library and start research and discovery. They aren't deterred yet, but they do start to see that the stereotypes aren't everything. For a start, they're Roms not Gypsies.

As the book runs on, Melanie becomes more and more reticent about continuing the game, as she's kept on reading through one of the books she checked out from the library. It takes a long while but she eventually gets April to read it too and they realise that being a gypsy might not be as much fun as they initially thought. There's a serious dark side. Roms don't have their own land, so they have to keep moving on, into countries where laws either allow or encourage their deaths. Half a million were sent to the gas chambers by the Nazis. Roms are outcasts who have been treated horribly throughout history. Suddenly the glamour's gone.

The good news is that they haven't really been playing the Gypsy Game anyway, which is one of the crucial points I need to make here. Many readers who eagerly awaited a sequel to a joyous book from their youth, 'The Egypt Game', will be disappointed by it, because they want to read about the kids playing their game and that really doesn't happen much. Sure, Toby's dad, who's an artist, paints a cardboard caravan for them and Marshall gets his bear when a big black dog eagerly adopts them, but other events quickly take over and the Gypsy Game is forgotten.

Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't gameplaying here, if you look for it. Much of what the kids have to do against the backdrop of those events is to solve problems. It's everywhere here and anyone who's sat down at a table to play a roleplaying game knows that much of what they have to do is solve problems. Some of them are comparatively minor, like figuring out how they can get Bear to Ken's house for a bath, then figuring out how they can actually get him into it when they succeed. These tasks take teamwork and decision-making, i.e. RPG fundamentals.

Some of them, however, are massively important, like the ethical dilemma that they soon find themselves in. While April was emphatically the lead character in 'The Egypt Game', Toby takes that role here because he drives the plot. Early on, we learn that he lives with his father in an artist’s studio above a pool hall and they're not doing very well. Toby lightly jokes about taking their last five bucks to buy food and they'll starve after that unless his dad can sell some pieces. Before long, though, he's gone, disappeared, which is a huge deal in the town, especially after the darker elements of the first book. Ken and April are both called into the principal's office to answer questions.

Fortunately, we learn that he hasn't been kidnapped and murdered. He chose to run away after overhearing a conversation between his father and some visitors, which took his options down to running away or being kidnapped, possibly because of his gypsy heritage. So he shows up in the Camp and the next puzzle becomes the logistics of keeping him fed, with a huge side order of keeping a promise to not tell anyone. As the story runs on, that morphs from a promise to an ethical dilemma, because what's more important: keeping a promise or keeping a friend alive?

While my immediate takeaways from the first book were the highly diverse cast of characters and the central gameplaying aspect, there was also a dark side to the story, with someone who kidnapped and killed children. While Snyder handled it incredibly well, it felt like it might have been too dark for a children's book; especially one aimed at younger readers. However, this is a far darker book and it spends a lot more time in that darkness. This is the second reason that a lot of readers who loved 'The Egypt Game' may hate 'The Gypsy Game'. A third is that the plot is so skimpy as to be almost nonexistent, because this thrives on theme far more than plot.

I should point out right now that I'm not one of those people. I thoroughly enjoyed 'The Egypt Game' and 'The Gypsy Game' both, merely for different reasons. The former is a lesson for kids not just on how to play games but how to create and run them too. The latter is a lesson for kids on perspective, explaining that games are important but, especially as they grow up, there are other things that are even more important and they're happening already, if we only look. This is a coming of age story, a light bulb moment, a nod to the importance of awareness.

Now Snyder had covered some of this in 'The Egypt Game' too; she didn't invent it out of whole cloth in the sequel. These kids are multi-racial because their neighbourhood is a melting pot by necessity. None have a particularly privileged life. Some are poor. Some are missing one or both parents. Some don't quite fit for a variety of reasons. Here, Snyder ramps that up. Toby and his dad are now so poor that they're hiding it from everyone else. There's a custody battle that has him run away from home. Now he's living on the streets, ending up in an impromptu homeless shelter with three "throwaway human beings", as the "raggedy old beggar woman" puts it. It's a great lesson for him that, while he's now got it much worse than his friends, who don't have it nice, there are others far worse off than him.

And Snyder doesn't hold back. This ceases relatively quickly to be about gypsies and becomes a story about outcasts. Sure, gypsies fit that bill, making the Gypsy Game play to the theme, but so do homeless people. Mickey's mentally handicapped and Vince lost everything after a head trauma; he gets terrible headaches now that last for days and the "doctor took all his money." Suddenly this is about custody battles, homelessness and medical debt. It's about outcasts, not just historically like Roms but right here and right now in the basement of an abandoned Arbor St. Baptist church. And it's about ethical dilemmas, where there isn't a good answer but one is perhaps better than the alterantive. That's all pretty deep for a children's novel.

And I adored that. Sure, the plot is skimpy and really doesn't go much further than the ethical dilemma the kids are faced with. Toby's run away from home. His father and the police fear the worst, but they know better. They know where he is. Should they tell someone? If so, who? Even if they've promised not to? This small but unnamed university town in California isn't a big place and we know that Toby's going to be found sooner or later anyway, hopefully still alive by that point. And there really isn't anything else, plotwise. The Gypsy Game is almost forgotten. April struggles not being in charge. And that's about it.

But those themes take over and they render this a powerful book indeed. 'The Egypt Game' is an important book because of what it did and when. Gary Gygax hadn't created 'Dungeons and Dragons' when it came out and, while it may not have influenced him directly, it presaged what he did in 1974. 'The Gypsy Game' is an important book because it imparts in powerful fashion a timeless message. While it continues a 1967 story in 1997 without skipping a day, it's a timeless book. It's not about a game and how we should play it. It's about life and how we should live it. And that's the biggest game of them all. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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