The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen

I would hardly call this “good” condition. I bought for my son’s Easter basket and I am so embarrassed to even put it in there. We love buying second hand books as it is economically and eco friendly but this has even been retired as a library book as indicated by the awful stickers placed all over the cover. I am going to try to carefully remove the library stickers but I am so disappointed and probably won’t put it in the Easter basket.

I don't think I could claim that I was ever actually bad at puzzles. To be bad at puzzles you need to do enough of them to know how you stack up. And in the long run, I'd say I've never really encountered that many puzzles. As a child I certainly didn't, and who could blame me? How many works of fiction were out there with the puzzle-loving child in mind? Aside from the odd "Encyclopedia Brown" novel (which doesn't really count since that's more crime solving than anything else) you were out of luck. Ah, to be a child in the new millennium. Because if you know a kid that loves puzzles, or better yet a child that doesn't even know if they love puzzles or not, Eric Berlin has your number. His first book "The Puzzling World of Winston Breen" tested the waters for young puzzlers everywhere. He scouted out how keen they were. How willing they might be to solve a mystery. Now he returns with the follow up, "The Potato Chip Puzzles" where everything hinges on our hero and his team to outsmart dastardly villains, solve key mysteries and save the day. When Winston Breen is called into the principal's office on practically the last day of school he is baffled. What did he do now? Is someone hurt at home? As it turns out, the principal merely needs Winston's help in solving a puzzle he received in the mail. As the school's crack puzzle solver, Winston does exactly that, allowing his principal and his school to be entered in a crazy contest by a cheery millionaire. If Winston and two of his friends (plus a chaperone) enter the Dimitri Simon potato chip puzzle contest, they will have a chance to earn much needed money for their school. This would be perfect, if there weren't one flaw. Winston and his buddies Jake and Mal have been paired with the nasty teacher Mr. Garvey. And if that weren't enough, one of the teams in the puzzle contest is willing to do anything . . . ANYTHING, to win. Someone's gonna get hurt, and the only question is if Winston can solve this biggest puzzle, who the culprint is, before time runs out. Basically Eric Berlin's books would dissolve on contact with child hands if the stories really did rely on his readers figuring out each and every puzzle by themselves. That's what's so keen about the series. As I may have mentioned before, I'm not the most puzzle-minded individual I know. I find them difficult. I found even the easiest puzzle in this book to be more than I could bear, and these are things that eight-year-olds can solve! So I skipped the puzzles, went straight to reading their solutions, and you know what? It wasn't different in the least from the days when I couldn't solve Encyclopedia Brown's mysteries either. Basically, whether you choose to solve or not solve, the story and its plot will continue unabated at a brisk pace, and the reading doesn't rely on one's own puzzle-mania (or lack thereof). There are plenty of books out there where kids have to run around solving puzzles in a big cont