Book cover of Figgs & Phantoms

Book description

From the Newbery Award-winning author of THE WESTING GAME, more clever riddles and wordplay, clues to be found, and mysteries to be solved!

A Newbery Honor book

The Amazing Dancing Figgs!
While Mona hates all the attention her eccentric relatives bring to her in town, there is one Figg family…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Figgs & Phantoms as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I loved Ellen Raskin’s much-lauded The Westing Game when I was nine years old, but I never got around to reading her 1974 middle-grade book Figgs & Phantoms, until recently. It’s a weird and whimsical story about family and grief with a magical realist touch.

Once a month, Mona Lisa Newton stands on the shoulders of her diminutive Uncle Florence Figg and dons a cloak to form the “Figg-Newton giant” so they can reach the rare not-for-sale books on the top shelf of a local bookstore. Their family has its own private mythology, including a version of heaven called Capri,…

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Did you know you can survive being swallowed by a whale? Or that octopus wrestling used to be an actual sport? Or, that once a town in Oregon didn't know what to do with a whale carcass that washed up on their beaches, so they...BLEW IT UP?

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