Complete Puzzle World: Puzzle Island/Puzzle Town/Puzzle Farm/Puzzle Castle/Puzzle Planet/Puzzle Mountain (Usborne Young Puzzles)

Rating:
Summary: Can turn kids into book lovers.
Review: This book is a compendium of a half-dozen short books, all of which have the same structure: a protagonist (boys and girls alternate in the various stories), whether a pirate, an astronaut, a knight or farmer, has to get from here to there, and encounters mazes, matching problems, problems finding lost objects and a fairly benign villain along the way. My 5-year old was fascinated with this book. She remains so, even though she has memorized all of the solutions and locations of the hidden objects. Since she can't read yet, Puzzle World was more than she could tackle alone, and that made for hours of participatory parenting, explaining the puzzles and watching her solve them. This book promotes thinking, lap time and a love of books.

Rating:
Summary: great puzzle book for young problem solvers
Review: This one volume collects all six of the Puzzle stories -- Puzzle Island, Puzzle Town, Puzzle Farm, Puzzle Castle, Puzzle Planet and Puzzle Mountain. Each story is 32 pags long and contains a two-page introduction followed by 7 two-page spread puzzles and concludes with an answer page. the introduction gives you the background story and several tasks to perform, such as a list of items to find while going through the story. Each puzzle spread has hidden objects as well as a unique puzzle -- a maze or obstacle search or matching, for example. By the end of the story you have collected needed objects and found a "villain" or solved a mystery.

Lots of fun for the younger set, and readily replayable/rereadable.