Looking for a dollop of LGBTQ+ lore with your brainteasers? This beguiling puzzle book has you covered.

Puzzle-maker Shatzer presents hundreds of word puzzles, logic puzzles, mazes, and trivia quizzes, all of them featuring queer themes. The roster includes word searches on a variety of queer-friendly subjects from The Wizard of Oz (look for “Poppy/Field” and “Judy/Garland”) to Joe Biden’s lesbian press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre; “Queerdoku[s],” which are like Sudokus but with letters; decoding puzzles constructed around witticisms from the likes of RuPaul; and word jumbles that yield lubricious puns, like, “When cruising at the mostly-straight gym, make sure you don’t get this” (“spotted”). For those who prefer visual-spatial tests, there are intricate mazes, including an elegant one with branching walls shaped like the Greek letter lambda, and a spot-the-difference puzzle featuring 16 minutely altered versions of the National Coming Out Day cartoon logo. Brainiacs will find knotty logic puzzles that ask them, for example, to deduce the rankings of contestants in a Miss Red drag queen pageant from a set of gonzo clues (“Candi Apple was not asked about climate change”). Shatzer offers an extraordinary variety of puzzle types at many skill levels, from simplistic crosswords to difficult, abstract take-offs on classics, including “invisible mazes” that don’t even show where the maze walls are. (There’s a complete answer section at the back for those who get stuck.) The author explains the puzzles in brief how-tos that combine lucid instructions with feisty queer attitude. (“Those homophobic bigots on the right may say “Don’t Say Gay”, but here we say Gay all the time as loud as possible and as many times as possible!”) Solving the puzzles also provides a blithe immersion in queer trivia and humor. (One “namedropping” puzzle unveils an Ellen DeGeneres one-liner: “Twice I have shown up at a party wearing the same thing as someone else. Both times it was William Shatner.”) Hardcore puzzle afficionados and casual gamers alike will find plenty of amusement here.

An inventive and entertaining collection of japes.

The good, old word search gets a bit more creative in this puzzle book.

In this collection, debut author Shatzer tweaks the familiar format of the word search—a grid of seemingly random letters that contains hidden words for the solver to circle—in a number of intriguing ways to increase their complexity and ingenuity. Many of the puzzles here have themes, such as dog breeds, shades of yellow, computer programming languages, or words with double-Z's, and most have leftover letters at the end that spell out a quotation, such as “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography - Ambrose Bierce.” “Quadruple Quotes” puzzles offer a concatenation of three quotations as word lists, with a fourth in the leftovers. Shatzer also provides “Fill-Er-Up” puzzles in which every single letter in the grid is in a listed word; these are more challenging to compose than they will be for readers to solve, though, and they drive the puzzle-maker to obscure terms such as seely (meaning weak and pitiable) and razoo (an Australian term for an imaginary coin). His “Punch Lines” puzzles’ leftover letters spell out the punchline of a joke; these range from clever groaners (“Why did the cowboy buy a dachshund?”…“He was told to get a long little doggy”) to a punning political statement (“How did we know Communism was doomed from the beginning?”…“All the red flags! North Korea, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos”). Some of the puzzles scramble the words in the list to impede the search, some give clue lists rather than word lists, and some don’t list any words or clues at all, resulting in more difficult challenges. Shatzer’s brief instructions for each puzzle are lucid and demystifying, and readers who get stumped will find all the solved puzzles, quotes, and jokes in the back of the book. The overall result is a beguiling collection that truly takes the word-search genre to a new level.

An engrossing and entertaining set of brainteasers to while away a rainy day.