An inventive and entertaining collection of japes.
Looking for a dollop of LGBTQ+ lore with your brainteasers? This beguiling puzzle book has you covered.
Puzzle-maker Shatzer presents hundreds of word puzzles, logic puzzles, mazes, and trivia quizzes, all of them featuring queer themes. The roster includes word searches on a variety of queer-friendly subjects from The Wizard of Oz (look for “Poppy/Field” and “Judy/Garland”) to Joe Biden’s lesbian press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre; “Queerdoku[s],” which are like Sudokus but with letters; decoding puzzles constructed around witticisms from the likes of RuPaul; and word jumbles that yield lubricious puns, like, “When cruising at the mostly-straight gym, make sure you don’t get this” (“spotted”). For those who prefer visual-spatial tests, there are intricate mazes, including an elegant one with branching walls shaped like the Greek letter lambda, and a spot-the-difference puzzle featuring 16 minutely altered versions of the National Coming Out Day cartoon logo. Brainiacs will find knotty logic puzzles that ask them, for example, to deduce the rankings of contestants in a Miss Red drag queen pageant from a set of gonzo clues (“Candi Apple was not asked about climate change”). Shatzer offers an extraordinary variety of puzzle types at many skill levels, from simplistic crosswords to difficult, abstract take-offs on classics, including “invisible mazes” that don’t even show where the maze walls are. (There’s a complete answer section at the back for those who get stuck.) The author explains the puzzles in brief how-tos that combine lucid instructions with feisty queer attitude. (“Those homophobic bigots on the right may say “Don’t Say Gay”, but here we say Gay all the time as loud as possible and as many times as possible!”) Solving the puzzles also provides a blithe immersion in queer trivia and humor. (One “namedropping” puzzle unveils an Ellen DeGeneres one-liner: “Twice I have shown up at a party wearing the same thing as someone else. Both times it was William Shatner.”) Hardcore puzzle afficionados and casual gamers alike will find plenty of amusement here.
An inventive and entertaining collection of japes.Pub Date: April 23, 2025
ISBN: 9798350992786
Page Count: 156
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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