Hidden Picture Puzzles at the Zoo by Liz Ball

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is definitely a book for curious kids with sharp eyes and lots of patience for detail! There are some ninety pages of line drawings packed with hidden items and the guide to those items is included right there in the drawing so you don't have to leave the page to check. If you have the print book (my review copy was of course electronic!) you can also color in the picture after you've discovered the items.

Some pictures are single page, others are doubles, and each depicts a different scene in the zoo and contains fun facts about the animals. Those are, as usual, mostly mammals, but some of them are not so common - such as capybaras and tapirs. There are some birds, reptiles, fish, and amphibians included.

This will be a fun book for any kid who likes to play detective.

Animosaics: Can You Find It? by Surya Sajnani

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I'm currently working on a children's book that contains puzzles, so I've been idly noting what's out there for a while, and I was curious about this one. The puzzles here are nothing like those I'm using though, so it was interesting to see another approach. It's all in color here, and though I'm not sure how it would work for anyone who is color-blind, the puzzles are not as easy as you might think, even for someone with all his opsins in a row!

The pages are each a single color - very bright and rainbow colors to be sure, but only a single color per puzzle. Hidden in the color and disguised by a mess of shapes and patterns are certain specific items you must find, different on each page. Some of them were a pain to uncover! Not that I'm especially great at puzzles, but unless you're a puzzle solver of Olympic proportions, this will certainly occupy your time pleasurably and satisfyingly, assuming you enjoy puzzles to begin with, and perhaps even if you haven't found your kind of puzzle yet! I commend this book as a satisfying and colorful brain exercise!

Find the Cutes by Celestial Noot and Vincent Noot

Rating: WARTY!

This is a Where's Waldo style book. No story, just a bunch of really complex pictures where you have to find the Cute family: Mr & Mrs and their five children. I get very little out of these, especially trying to find these things on an iPad. The image is far too small. I don't get the point of an ebook version of this. Yes, you can enlarge the image, but then you're stuck with trying to keep track of where you are are on the page. The problem is that when it's enlarged, the image and text are blurry. It's nothing but a pain. I mean if you're really insane about these things, then you'll probably like this, but as it is, in this format, I can't recommend this at all. It's really poor quality.