Review: Women in History: 300 Word Search Puzzles

Constructed by Rebecca Falcon

Available now from Chartwell Books

Review copy

I love a good word search puzzle to keep myself entertained. They're simpler than a crossword or sudoku (to me), but still keep me engaged while I'm working them. The theme of Women in History instantly had me giving this word search book a chance.

At $11, it is more expensive than the word search books I see in the grocery store checkout. I can tell this book has a more premium format, with thick paper and a spine that is able to lay flat so that the book doesn't close on my current puzzle.

The 300 puzzles in this book are arranged into three levels: easy (up-down or left-right only), moderate (up-down, down-up, left-right, right-left), and difficult (the only level with diagonal). On the easy levels, you find the names of women, grouped by theme. In the moderate, the puzzles focus on the accomplishments of singular women. The difficult puzzles focus on women's contributions to society.

Personally, the difficult puzzles are my favorite. I like finding words diagonally, so for me it was extremely disappointing that wasn't even an option for most of the puzzles. Overall, these are fairly simple puzzles, with not many words to find per puzzle. The puzzles are well-constructed, but a bit easy. The premium feel makes it seem like this book should be more advanced, for the serious word searcher, but most of the puzzles are super quick and basic.

Women in History does have a major editing error. Quite a few of the puzzles and clues aren't printed together - the clues on one page belong to the puzzle on the page before. This affects about 1/12 of the book.

This word search book has a great theme and would make a decent gift, but I wish the editing issue had been caught and that the puzzles were harder.

Review: Aloha

Art by Tere Gott

Available now from Tere Gott

Review copy

Chilean artist Tere Gott frequently posts her art on Instagram, and the coloring-book pictures in Aloha are super Instagram friendly. There are succulents, yoga, and more. The theme of Aloha is the beach, but not all of the images are directly beach related. My favorite page features a UFO.

This coloring book includes 22 images and is $45. Yes, that is pricey. However, this is an oversized coloring book. The book itself is 17.4 x 11.8 inches and each page is perforated. These posters are pretty easy to frame in an 17 x 11" frame, which is an easy size to find since it is a common size for digital printing. 

In addition, the sheets are 0.5 lb duplex paper, meaning that they're thick and backed so that there is no bleedthrough, even if the page isn't removed before coloring. (The cover lies completely flat when opened.) Markers, watercolors, and more can be used on these pages. 

This is an incredibly designed coloring book. The designs are simple, though some of the detail work is difficult with mediums like watercolors. Most of the backgrounds are plain, allowing for personal creativity.

Aloha is an incredibly designed coloring book. I'd love to see more coloring books in this style.

Review: Banana Fox and the Secret Sour Society

Written and illustrated by James Kochalka

Available now from Graphix

Review copy

Popular children's graphic novelist James Kochalka starts a new series with Banana Fox and the Secret Sour society. The titular Banana Fox is a detective who loves bananas, receiving adulation from his fan club, and saying, "Wowie pow!" He's aided by Sharyanna, or Flashlight, a kid who he meets at the beginning of the story and who is the much better detective.

The story of the Secret Sour Society is appealingly silly. There's mind-controlling soda and a giant turtle and plenty of fun things. Some of Kochalka's work has crossover appeal, but this one is aimed squarely at young readers. The art adds excellent context to help younger readers understand the text, in addition to being fun on its own. Kochalka's art is deceptively simple. He doesn't crowd the page, but there is plenty of dynamic movement to guide the eye.

 I found Banana Fox himself tedious. But that's fine. Six-, seven-, and eight-year-old kids will love Banana Fox and the Secret Sour Society and there's no inappropriate content. Nothing wrong with kids reading stories they find fun.

Review: Crush + Color: Twentieth Century Foxes

Illustrated by Maurizio Campidelli

Available now from Castle Point Books

Review copy

I think all of Maurizio Campidelli's Crush + Color coloring books are good fun, but the Twentieth Century Foxes pun in particular cracked me up. I think this is the first book in the series not to cover a single actor. Actors not pictured on the cover include Antonio Banderas, Patrick Swayze, Pierce Brosnan, and more. All have more than one coloring page. An index might have been a nice addition to this one.

Thankfully, the actors are identified on each page just in case I didn't recognize them. Their names are always used in the short fantasy bubble that appears opposite the coloring page. Only one page in a spread is designed to be colored and the pages are perforated, allowing for the pages to be removed and either shared or used for decoration.

The art on these pages goes almost to the edges, but there is a small border. I find most of the images appealing from a coloring standpoint, with a mix of detailed areas for when I want to focus and bigger areas for when I want to zone out. I feel like Campidelli is great at laying out a coloring page. The paper is nice too, much better than a children's coloring book. I used markers on one page without bleed-through to the next coloring page.

I do think that Campidelli's likenesses vary in quality. I don't particularly like his Denzel Washington or George Clooney. But I think his Antonio Banderas and Kurt Russell are great. There is more detail to the faces than the rest of the page, which doesn't always work for me.

Overall though, I very much enjoy this coloring series and think Crush + Color: Twentieth Century Foxes is a fun addition. These coloring books have a fun sense of humor and appealing subject matter.

Review: Just Like That

By Gary D. Schmidt

Available now from Clarion Books

Review copy

Just Like That is a companion novel to The Wednesday Wars and Okay for Now, both of which I haven't read. I thought it stood well on its own, although I did get the sense at the beginning that I was reading the sequel to a book I hadn't read.

Meryl Lee Kowalski is struggling with grief, or the "Blank," as she calls it. Every night on the news, she sees reports of soldiers killed in Vietnam who never got to say good-bye to their loved ones. She struggles to handle the weight of it and the way it mirrors her feelings about her best friend Holling Hoodhood, who died suddenly in a car crash. She never got to say goodbye to him. Her parents don't know how to handle her feelings and are secretly dealing with their own issues, and choose to send Meryl Lee to St. Elene's Preparatory Academy for Girls. 

Meryl Lee struggles to fit into the boarding school culture, which involves things like not talking to the girls who work around the school. It also requires doing a sport, which Meryl Lee had never considered before and initially fails at, until finding something strangely compelling about the violence of lacrosse. She also starts to notice a power struggle between the headmistress and some teachers with different political views.

In a parallel story line, Matt Coffin moves into a shack on the coast. He's on the run from someone, and dealing with his own grief. He starts to carve out a life for himself, a storyline that appeals to the part of me that loved rugged domestic stories like Hatchet and the first Boxcar Children. He also encounters some helpful adults that give him room to approach them - one of whom happens to be the headmistress of St. Elene's.

The eventual meeting of Meryl Lee and Matt is inevitable, but the path to that point is an enjoyable one. Just Like That is stuffed full of incident and ideas and interweaving stories. I never felt like Gary D. Schmidt had lost control of the plot, however. He masterfully balances the disparate elements of Just Like That, tying everything together with the themes of grief and the struggle to heal. Just Like That is  deeply sad novel, but also a very funny and hopeful one.