The Potato Chip Puzzles

     If you like puzzles, fun adventure books, and mysteries, this book is for you! The Potato Chip Puzzles, by Eric Berlin, is in a series I really like called The Puzzling World Of Winston Breen (The first book in this series is called The Puzzling World Of Winston Breen, and it's just as good as this one, maybe better.  Also I heard that there's a third coming out this year, called The Puzzler's Mansion!)
     
       Okay, so this fun-filled book starts off with a twelve or thirteen year-old boy named Winston Breen who loves doing puzzles and is really good at them too.  One day, his school's principal receives a slip of paper with seemingly random letters and numbers on it in his mailbox, and so calls Winston to the office to help him with this little mystery.  One deciphered, the message is a phone number.  Winston and his principal call it, and soon become part of a statewide (at least) puzzle hunt at a potato chip factory, owned by Simon's Snack Foods.  And... bump bum bum... the winner gets fifty thousand dollars for their school!
     
       Winston, along with his two best friends and a mean-ish advanced math teacher, set off on a puzzle hunt against lots of other schools.  But someone is determined to win.  And by determined to win, I mean willing to cheat in the contest by giving their competition flat tires and moving important signs.  Who could the cheater be?

   I think the best part of this book is the fact that every time Winston gets a puzzle to solve, whether it be on the back of the granola bar box or in the puzzling competition, the reader gets to solve it too!  The puzzles, from word squares to cool math problems to riddles, are just perfect for a twelve-year-old to solve, and have a lot of fun doing it!

        I rate this awesome book five out of five stars, and I think that anyone from nine to sixteen would enjoy it, boys and girls.  Happy reading!

                                                             ✻  Rosalind  ✻