The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon by Ellen Raskin

If you have read Ellen Raskin's Westing Game, and even if you haven't, this is a book you really need to get your hands on. But I definitely recommend it for kids, and deem it well worth a revisit for those with childhood nostalgia for it. Whether it'd have anywhere near the same appeal for anybody coming to it for the first time as an adult, I don't know. (It probably helped that I had only very vague memories of what the solution was.) It's also just a fun story, with lots of humor ranging from the ridiculous to the sly to the utterly deadpan. I remember really throwing myself into that puzzle as a kid, and I still found the whole mystery plot unexpectedly engaging as an adult. Raskin really engages her readers in attempting to solve the puzzle of what happened to Leon (or Noel), teasingly hinting when she's just provided a clue, and outlining a strategy for attempting to guess the missing words of the message. Then, as soon as someone fished him out, he disappeared, and she spent the next twenty years searching for him (employing, it must be said, some rather dubious strategies). Carillon last saw the guy, he was bobbing up and down in the water, trying to tell her something she could only half-hear between all the blubs and glubs. (I am sure this cannot have been legally binding, but never mind that detail.) The two did not see each other again for many years, and when a reunion was finally arranged, it was quickly ended by a boat accident. Carillon, who was married to a boy named Leon - he later decided he'd rather be called Noel - when they were aged five and seven, in order to secure the inheritance of a soup-factory-based family fortune. And this book, which I remember adoring at the age of eight or so, is no exception. I might not enjoy these books quite as intensely as I did way back when, but plenty of them turn out to still be entertaining. Fortunately, somewhat to my surprise, I've had a pretty good success rate. Show More enjoy, but you've also gone and tarnished a childhood memory.

The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon by Ellen Raskin