Customer Reviews

Quest for the Riddle Stone: A Riddle Book

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Quest for the Riddle Stone is a 140 page book of contemporary word riddles. Each of these riddles provides an oblique description of a single thing or concept. Although puns and wordplay are used in many of the riddles, the most common theme is to describe something in an unexpected and clever way. These are not kid riddles; many of them use vocabulary and concepts that aren't elementary school level.

The authors have split the book into five sections: an introduction, the riddles, hints, answers and explanations. The introduction is blissfully short and, in an amusing manner, explains how to use the book.

The Riddle section has one riddle per page with a cross reference at the bottom showing you where to find the hints, the check hint, the answer and the explanation. The check hint is a clever hint that gives you the vowel/consonant layout of the answer. That is, if the answer was "APPLE" then the check hint would be VCCCV since APPLE starts and ends with a vowel and has consonants in the middle. This is a very useful feature since if you think you know the answer and you're wrong, it doesn't spoil the riddle for you.

The hint section contains both the check hints and regular hints, hints that give you an idea of what direction to take solving the riddle without really giving it away. Some of the hints weren't all that useful, but several times they kicked me off the wrong track that I had gotten myself onto.

When I first saw the answers, I was somewhat startled. The answers are all encrypted! Each page has a matrix of letters that you need to decode to see what each answer is. At first I was nonplussed by this, but then I realized that it was kind of nice. There's no way I could accidentally see the answer to another riddle by just looking at the page. You can also you it as an extra hint - decode the first letter of the answer, if that doesn't help decode the second letter and so on.

The explanations provide reasons for why the lines of the riddles make sense. There were a few where I didn't understand what one of the lines meant and the explanation then told me what the troublesome line was referring to.

In the explanations I also stumbled across the hidden riddles! I found the explanation for Hidden Riddle #2 (which unfortunately ruined the riddle for me), but led me to look for the hidden riddles. This made me go back to the introduction where I found another hidden riddle.

All in all, this book provides more than eighty original, intelligent and enjoyable riddles in a well crafted format. I gave the book five stars mostly in contrast to Riddle Me This: A World Treasury of Word Puzzles, Folk Wisdom, and Literary Conundrums, a book of "classic" riddles which was anything but original and enjoyable.

True riddles, not silly jokes, and not so difficult you can't solve them. This is great for boosting kids' thought processes, recognizing the "joke" in the wordplay and making contrast and comparison to solve. And if you need hints, they're located at other places in the book as well as the answers for a last resort. I highly recommend!