DIVERSIONS

The good, old word search gets a bit more creative in this puzzle book.

In this collection, debut author Shatzer tweaks the familiar format of the word search—a grid of seemingly random letters that contains hidden words for the solver to circle—in a number of intriguing ways to increase their complexity and ingenuity. Many of the puzzles here have themes, such as dog breeds, shades of yellow, computer programming languages, or words with double-Z's, and most have leftover letters at the end that spell out a quotation, such as “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography - Ambrose Bierce.” “Quadruple Quotes” puzzles offer a concatenation of three quotations as word lists, with a fourth in the leftovers. Shatzer also provides “Fill-Er-Up” puzzles in which every single letter in the grid is in a listed word; these are more challenging to compose than they will be for readers to solve, though, and they drive the puzzle-maker to obscure terms such as seely (meaning weak and pitiable) and razoo (an Australian term for an imaginary coin). His “Punch Lines” puzzles’ leftover letters spell out the punchline of a joke; these range from clever groaners (“Why did the cowboy buy a dachshund?”…“He was told to get a long little doggy”) to a punning political statement (“How did we know Communism was doomed from the beginning?”…“All the red flags! North Korea, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos”). Some of the puzzles scramble the words in the list to impede the search, some give clue lists rather than word lists, and some don’t list any words or clues at all, resulting in more difficult challenges. Shatzer’s brief instructions for each puzzle are lucid and demystifying, and readers who get stumped will find all the solved puzzles, quotes, and jokes in the back of the book. The overall result is a beguiling collection that truly takes the word-search genre to a new level.

An engrossing and entertaining set of brainteasers to while away a rainy day.