puzzles

Book Review: Silent Extraction

/ Kristi / Leave a comment

Silent Extraction
Coordinator Files Trilogy #1
by J.N. Timmer

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Middle grade adventure, puzzles

When your parents and sister are kidnapped and you have good reason to believe the kidnappers after after you too, what do you do? This book is a call-back to the old Choose Your Own Adventure franchise, except the choices are puzzles that the reader must solve in order to move on correctly.

Classic Choose Your Own Adventure books were a big thing when I was growing up, but I remember that I didn’t enjoy them that much, because they kinda stressed me out. I didn’t trust my instincts and decision-making skills, and would worry about making the wrong decision and ending the story early. However, a book of the same type that requires you to solve a puzzle correctly to move is more objective than subjective, which appeals to me. The book is written in 2nd person, which is pretty normal for this kind of book, though I am a little confused about the age the MC is supposed to be and thus the age range the book is intended for. This might be on purpose, but that means it’s difficult to know how to gauge the difficulty of the puzzles based on the age the book is meant for. For me, an adult who enjoys escape rooms and other puzzle-y things, some of the puzzles were super easy and some were a bit too arbitrary or subjective. I think I got only one completely wrong, and though I did understand the explanation given, I might have wished for a little more explanation before making my decision; and I kinda just guessed another one or two that I got right. However, if the puzzles were all super easy, it wouldn’t be very fun, and there are hints for every puzzle in the back of the book.

The story is appropriately exciting and even gives the young MC a realistic reason for being involved in the action and danger without involving police or other adults. It’s an overall quick read, even with the time spent solving puzzles. It was a fast-paced race to first save your family from some very dangerous people. The only aspect of the story that I found a bit off was one wrong answer that leads to a brief page in which you basically kill your own dad. It felt a bit extreme to me.

When I read a self-published book, it is my intention not to let things that a professional editor would help with affect my view too much. I’m not saying that there is no burden of responsibility here, but it’s harder for self-published authors. So while it did not affect my rating, I will at least mention that there are several mistakes throughout the text; for example, there are a lot of comma errors and one “your” that should have been a “you’re.” It can detract from the book for some, so let that be a warning. And I was sad when one puzzle instruct me to cut pieces apart and put them together to find the right page number to go to next, for various reasons, one of which is that I like being able to share books with others. I didn’t know this was a one-and-done story. But since it’s the only puzzle like that, the author could easily provide a link to a replacement puzzle online, allowing the original reader to print the puzzle and pass it on with the book (though he’d also have to separate the puzzle from the story text on the other side of the same page, but again, easily done). On the other hand, I am seeing now that the book is fairly low priced on Amazon, so I guess it’s not a huge deal to buy a new copy if you read the book, destroy the one page, and then want to share the book with someone else. And to be fair, I didn’t have to cut the pieces apart; it was pretty easy to solve just by looking at it. (On an unrelated note, there’s a Kindle version of this book, which makes me wonder how that cutting puzzle would work.)

Overall, I really liked the idea of a puzzle-led Choose Your Own Adventure type of book, and this did deliver well on that idea. It ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, but not the kind that I find too often these days (especially in self-published books) where even the story goal of the first book isn’t resolved—fortunately, it is. I think that kids aged around 10-12 who like puzzles and books with adventure or thrills would like this book.

I received a free review copy from the publisher in exchange for my honest unedited feedback.

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Book Review: Journal 29

/ Kristi / Leave a comment

Journal 29
created by Dimitris Chassapakis

My rating: 2.5 / 5
Genre: Puzzle book

I was given this book as a Christmas gift by the owners of the escape room company I used to work for. They thought it would be right up my alley, and my husband and I were excited to go through it, thinking it would be like an escape room in a book. It was not, but to be fair, I don’t see anywhere that the book is actually stated to be like an escape room. However, even leaving that aside, there were some issues that made the book less enjoyable than it could have been.

The book starts with the beginning of a story, the same paragraph that is shown in the synopsis. But that story literally never came up again, never came to fruition, was simply forgotten about. There was no reason to include it, though I guess it gave a little starting point for the aesthetic and theming contained throughout the book. And I did like the look of the pages overall; a lot of things that seemed like pointless artwork even ended up being not so pointless by the end. I liked the way not every page was a self-contained puzzle.

The puzzles themselves, though, left a lot to be desired. There were some interesting ones that were fun to solve, some that took a little noodling and led to a thrilling “aha!” moment. However, far too many of them were just huge leaps in logic that you can only get if you happen to think like the puzzle creator. Or get help (more on that later). Many required outside knowledge, a lot of things we had to look up online, and sometimes we didn’t even know what to look up. And there were no official hints. It wouldn’t have been difficult to include at least some starter hints, help to get started, on the website where answers were entered, but instead, we had to find a forum online where other players were giving their own suggestions and hints.

I think, overall, the book needed further testing. As someone who has built a few escape rooms in the past and now builds another type of puzzle game for a living, I know that every puzzle I make needs to be tested and reviewed. I need to hear if it’s way too hard, too confusing, too big of a logic leap, or has mistakes (and yes, there was at least one puzzle in this book that had a mistake that made it harder to solve). And while I don’t want to imply that the rest of the world needs to cater to Americans, if we’d at least known from the start the creator wasn’t from the US, it might have helped us think a little differently for some of the puzzles (if you do decide to go through this book, just know that commas are used where we would put a decimal point in a number; that’s just the simpler one to explain). Again, it would have been simple to have a brief explanation of things like that on the web page for that puzzle.

I think the book was an interesting concept, and if you enjoy straight puzzles, you might want to check it out. If you’re looking for something more like an escape room, I’d suggest one of the many tabletop escape games instead.

Find out more about Journal 29

See what I’m reading next.

If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!