loved this so much.

I used to have books when I was young that were books / puzzle books and this is just the perfect combination of fun, puzzling and theme.

Great great fun. Really entertaining and unique

hugely grateful for my advance copy thank you. This brought back fond memories

Like an escape room in a book, puzzles and brain teasers to keep kids busy and brains ticking away! Love this series.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publishers for letting me read this book in exchange for my review.

I was expecting something like the Usbourne Puzzle Adventures I loved as a kid, but this is a lot simpler than that... though there are more puzzles.

If you think of this as a book of puzzles for kids with a loose storyline to tie it all together then you won't be disappointed

Hmmm... After one of these puzzle books for kids where the puzzles are presented in quite suitably clever fashion as part of a story, but whose plot was risible, I found one with a much better plot. This is almost swinging back the first way. Inspired by finding a gift of a map and a compass, you decide to explore. You rest in a treehouse, discover a mouse called Jet (of course), have to suffer an attack on the treehouse by a goat, fly away, find a boat... And that's just the first chapter! After that you go through a jungle, underwater, on a train – it's yet again pure bonkers, as are the companions you gather and immediately forget about.

Luckily, then, we have the distractions, in the way of the puzzles these books are really about. They're all pretty similar, on some very rare occasions throwing a curveball into the mix but generally getting on with the job of giving us wordsearches, infant sudokus (and with a filled-in one to show their rules EVERY occasion, in EVERY chapter in EVERY book), and so on. Here the read-only-the-selected-letters-in-a-string ones have a different style, and a number sequence calls for division for a change, while another is more convoluted than usual, but by now the pattern was very familiar to me. And I remained very eager to commend the book for the brain-growing mental skills it demands and rewards you with.

I'm still not sure where I stand on the plot side of these. I can see why they're so slapdash, when these are puzzle books, but if they're naff enough to put readers off collecting the set they will be doing nobody a favour. Make them this clumsy-seeming and people will wonder why a puzzle book needs a framing device of a story anyway, but make them too good and people may feel the puzzles interrupt the narrative far too much.

Oh, and once again there's pronoun mangling. But beyond that I am sure we do get something that demands a decent amount of time on it – the books constantly turn to word puzzles to reveal the plot, so you cannot skim this and 'cheat' the action. Yet I suspect this is a use-once book, publishers and book users seemingly having polar opposite thoughts to how successfully one can just erase the answers and make it brand new for the younger child when she's ready to open one of these up. But that being known, and with librarians reluctant to purchase such an item and see it filled out in vivid ink, I think these, clunky plot and all, are worth buying. Four stars plus.