raskin on all cylinders

I'm sitting here weeping and weeping. 

Greta's chess tourney put me in the mood to get out The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin's masterpiece of mind and heart. I just now read the last bunch of shattering pages. She's of the Dickens school of wave-upon-wave resolution at the end of novels. It's so satisfying; in this case it leaves me a wreck every time. 

I'll never forget the very first time I closed its pages and said to myself, out loud, "I want to be remarkable." That's my thought to this day.