Fun story book with lots of great puzzles. Kept my son entertained for quite a while. Will be looking for more of these.

This was a great go-do during the half-term break as a quick answer to the incessant... "so what can I do now". There was great variety which was wonderful for kids of varying attention spans and abilities.

This is a varied collection of good puzzles for young kids for whom a little linking story will fire imaginations and add to their enjoyment. You could just go through solving the puzzles without reading the story elements, and I was personally hoping for a bit more story that was intrinsic to the book, like an Usborne Puzzle Adventure. But the story here is still a useful thread to tie the puzzles together.

This book is a mixture of puzzle and storybook where you have to rescue the stolen gems. There are illustrations and a cute ghost cat guide to help you with the story. I liked the puzzles and there are enough different puzzles to keep things interesting and though some are a bit tricky there are answers at the back of the book. I really want to read/complete more books in this series so I give it 5 stars.
Thank You to Net Gallery for the Book!

Perhaps I drew the short straw in my first choice of these books to review, for the story was abjectly bonkers – good, I thought, as a better one would be disturbed in its flow by all the puzzles the book is here to deliver. But here the mental tests (and "brain training" I'm sorry to say I remember it being called) are accompanied by a smoother narrative ride, even if the themes of each chapter are brought to us in all manners possible – the visual design, the theming of the puzzles and the snippets of the book's plot.

Here a cranky goblin king has had a gem stolen from the crown jewels – there's a space visible when he wears his crown. We have to hope to have nothing missing between the ears as we have a grand selection of posers to complete, a handful of which each chapter give us chunk-ending clues, allowing us pause before the next spread. (Gather enough chunk-ending clues, solve the master puzzle, and you can unlock something or other online, as well.)

And as before, the spreads and the chapters all seem to have the same sort of test, from the traditional maze to number sequences, and still at pandemic level, the junior sudoku. Here, however, the tests seem to progressively harden, so a maze gains some numbers (and many more potential paths), and we have to cross the numbers making the target total and no others. A wordsearch gains a word not included, to keep us hunting it in vain perhaps.

There is still the bizarre here – giant magpie villages, squirrel/pixie hybrids called squixies that love playing card games, and so on. But the narrative is actually so much more entertaining. Enough to re-read, once you've solved all the puzzles? Possibly, especially if you didn't really twig what was happening first time round through being so busy. Perhaps, too, getting better at the puzzles means the plot is not interrupted so much – and the Reithian in me does suggest your young book lover should be getting better at these games, before school returns. It once again gets a slapped wrist for the pronoun mangling, but this one of the series (of seven in total, I believe) gets a firm four and a half stars.