45 pages • 1 hour read
Zilpha Keatley SnyderThe Egypt Game
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1967A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Discovery of Egypt”
The story begins in a large college town in California at a shabby antique shop, A-Z Antiques. An off-putting old man runs the store. He’s known as the Professor, though nobody in the neighborhood can recall exactly why:
He was tall and bent and his thin beard straggled up his cheeks like dry moss on gray rocks. His eyes were dark and expressionless, and set so deep under heavy brows that from a distance they looked like dark empty holes (4).
The Professor’s store sits in a rundown neighborhood consisting of small shops and apartment buildings. The inhabitants are diverse racially and ethnically, and all the children in the neighborhood are wary of the antique dealer. One day in September, the Professor peers out of a dirty window in his back storeroom. He witnesses something that will later be known as the Egypt Game. Some children have slipped through a loose board in the fence and entered his storage yard. There are two girls aged about 11, one white and one African American, and a little boy of about four. The white girl is called April, and the Black girl is named Melanie. Marshall is the little boy; he carries a plush octopus named Security:
The one who was tugging at the little boy’s leg was thin and palely blond, and her hair was arranged in a straggly pile on the top of her head. Her high cheekbones and short nose were faintly spattered with freckles […] The other girl, who had the little boy by the shoulders, was African American, as was the little boy himself. A similarity in their pert features and slender arching eyebrows indicated that they were probably brother and sister (6).
The Professor’s storage yard is trashy and dilapidated, but contains some antique odds and ends that the children find enthralling. The girls zero in on a birdbath and a cracked bust of Egyptian queen Nefertiti. Pretending they are priestesses, or women who performed ancient, sacred rituals, they place the sculpture in the bird bath and start building a shrine. They pull up weeds in the yard and place them before the statue as an offering.
A customer calls the Professor away. By the time he returns to the window, the children have gone.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Enter April”
The story turns to the girl named April Hall. A month earlier, she had come to live with her grandmother, Caroline in the Casa Rosada apartments. April’s mother, Dorothea, is an aspiring performer and Hollywood star and can’t take care of her daughter while she’s pursuing her career. After depositing April with Caroline, Dorothea insists that the move is only temporary. Caroline doesn’t believe her, but April does. Caroline tells April that she’s supposed to eat lunch every day with the Ross family, who also live in the building. She’s also supposed to check in with Mrs. Ross to let her know if she’s going out.
Ignoring this rule, April explores the neighborhood and walks into the Professor’s shop. Unlike the other children, she isn’t frightened of him, but finds him intriguing. She confesses that she likes antiques and believes she was a high priestess in a former life. The Professor doesn’t laugh and says that many things are possible.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Enter Melanie—And Marshall”
Shortly before noon, Melanie Ross knocks on April’s door to bring her downstairs to lunch. She’s heard that April is slightly odd but still wants to make a friend her own age. She lacks friends in the building and longs for companionship. When April opens the door, Melanie is startled by April’s false eyelashes, her upswept hairdo, and her ratty fur stole. As they walk down the hall, April immediately talks about her mother, who is currently touring as a singer with a band. Dorothea has also played extras in the movies. Her agent Nick is confident he will soon get a big part lined up for her. When the girls arrive at the Ross apartment, Mrs. Ross doesn’t comment on April’s odd appearance. Instead, she feeds the children and suggests that April might like to see Melanie’s bedroom library. Both girls are avid readers and immediately bond over books.
April comes across a volume with cut-out paper dolls tucked inside. Melanie explains that she invents stories about imaginary families and uses cut-out images to represent them. She’s created 14 families in her collection. April eagerly makes suggestions about new plots involving the characters. That afternoon, the girls concoct ever more elaborate capers. When it’s time for April to leave, the girls agree that they make a good team and should continue their imaginary game.
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Egypt Girls”
Throughout August, April and Melanie continue to play. April finds a book about Egypt, and soon the two girls are reading everything they can find on the ancient culture. A few days before school starts in September, they come across the Professor’s storage yard and begin the Egypt Game.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Evil God and the Secret Spy”
On their second trip to the storage yard, the girls erect a temple in the lean-to at the back. They repurpose Nefertiti’s bust as the goddess Isis. Then, they decide that Marshall will be the boy pharaoh, Marshamosis. Next, they create an effigy of the evil crocodile god Set. Afterward, they decide that they need to add to their prop collection: “They postponed the game and went instead to scout around in the alley for boards and boxes to use in making things like thrones and altars” (48). The girls are unaware of Professor observing them through the storeroom window.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Eyelashes and Ceremony”
The day before school starts, Melanie ponders how to keep April from wearing her false eyelashes to school. She knows the rest of the students will mock her, and casually hides the lashes where April won’t find them. Even though April doesn’t wear the lashes, her first few days at school are bumpy. Melanie tries to act as a go-between until April is accepted: “By the third week in September, although the sixth graders were still teasing April—from a safe distance—they were beginning to think of her rather proudly, as their own private oddball” (52). Two of the class bullies have christened her “February.” The nickname indicates that she’s one of their own.
The girls continue building their set for the Egypt Game: “The lean-to temple now had two altars and two gods. The birdbath altar had been moved to the right side, while on the left was the altar of Set, the Evil One” (53). They have created a statue of Set out of mud. For his eyes, they find some red glass buttons. Once the backdrop is complete, the girls turn their attention to the ceremonies they must perform. Melanie makes fake papyrus scrolls to write down all the rituals. On the way home from school one day, the girls come across a peculiar-looking rock that they add to Set’s altar as the Crocodile Stone. Marshall participates proudly in their rituals as the young pharaoh.
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
The novel doesn’t begin with the lead characters, April and Melanie, but with the Professor. He is a shadowy, mysterious figure throughout most of the novel. Although the author gives us insight into what the characters are thinking, she doesn’t show us the Professor’s mental state. Events described from his perspective are factual and dry, with no sense of his feelings. Members of the community, who all find him off-putting, shape the reader’s understanding of him. Although April is the only child in the neighborhood who isn’t afraid of him, she still senses something quite wrong with the Professor. Her conversations with him are one-sided, with her talking into his silence:
April wondered why she’d gabbed so much. It wasn’t really like her. She’d started out just trying to get the old man to talk and then somehow she couldn’t quit. It was almost as if the old man’s deadly silence was a dangerous dark hole that had to be filled up quickly with lots of words (21).
Within the first few chapters, the Professor is presented as an oddity. Like April, he is different from other people. She wears false eyelashes and tries to emulate her mother; he is quiet and disconnected, a mystery. His story is told in parallel with April’s, but the reader receives a much better sense of April’s thoughts and feelings through her interior monologues. We learn quickly that she resents being left with her grandmother: “It hadn’t occurred to April that Caroline had moved because of her—so she could have a bedroom of her own. She knew she ought to feel grateful, but for some reason what she really felt was angry” (14). April’s anger is misdirected. She should resent her flighty mother, but she still idealizes Dorothea and tries to mimic her hairstyle and false eyelashes.
These initial chapters establish the theme of Rejecting One’s Present Reality. Both April and the Professor’s see their lives as unsatisfactory. While the reader doesn’t know why the Professor is unhappy, his outward demeanor indicates that he is. April’s desire to dwell in the past is more easily understood. She wants to be back with her mother and hates her current circumstances: “What made Caroline think that April was going to be with her long enough for it to make any difference whether she had a room of her own or not? Dorothea had promised it would only be for a little while” (14).
April’s sees her new home and college town as utterly mundane. She longs for the glamor of her former life with Dorothea: “April shut her eyes and tried to picture her, but tonight the picture wouldn’t come clear. It was only a blur—a blur of laughter, talk, movement and color. But a bright and beautiful blur, no matter how distant, was better than a reality that was dull and gray” (51). Once Melanie stimulates April’s imagination, April homes in on the exotic culture of ancient Egypt. This may be a substitute for the excitement that she lost when her mother sent her away:
In a very short time they had accumulated all sorts of fascinating facts about tombs and temples, pharaohs and pyramids, mummies and monoliths […] They decided that the Egyptians couldn’t have been more interesting if they had done it on purpose (35).
April’s need for glamor to replace her lost mother also stimulates the less flamboyant Melanie: “April was the most exciting friend Melanie had ever had. No one else knew about so many fascinating things, or could think up such marvelous things to do” (36).
The two girls heighten each other’s flights of fancy. The Egypt Game answers the emotional needs of each girl—Melanie, who longs for companionship, and April, who is fascinated by the past. The game takes on a life of its own: “Nobody ever planned it ahead, at least, not very far. Ideas began and grew and afterwards it was hard to remember just how” (48). Once the game develops beyond the imaginative stage, it takes root in the Professor’s storage yard, a location not associated with either girl. A connection is building among April, Melanie, and the Professor, eventually leading them to forge an unlikely community.
