Review Detail

Jeff Chen and Stuart Gibbs teamed up to bring fans the best of Spy School and tricky puzzles. Stuart Gibbs uses the personality of each notable character in Spy School to discuss the tasks. The nice characters give lots of hints, and the characters known for their tough love give few hints. Then there is Murray Hill, the villain, who has hijacked a few chapters and only gives diabolical hints and expects you to cheat to understand the tasks.
Each chapter ends with a password that is needed for the last puzzle. I appreciate the answers are in the back because I was stumped more than once. The target audience is for 8+, and you need to be at least that to follow some of these challenges. There are unusual twists to keep the puzzles intriguing, like Sudoku but with letters. For whatever reason, that was much harder than when it is numbers. I like that many of the puzzles have step-by-step instructions and a progression from easy to hard to “train” you for spy school. All of it culminates to a site you can plug your final answer into and if you are like me the” I give up” explain it to me button is hidden in the black text on the website but it will allow you to enter the password and the villainous password to satisfy that you have made it to the end.
I worked with my child on a few pages a night, which gave us months of entertainment. The book is in standard novel size, which does make it challenging to work with a partner. One tip we recommend is to take a picture of some pages so you don’t have to flip back when applying a cipher to a puzzle. My favorite section was the Murray Hill chapter. The more unhinged your answer, the more correct you were, and my son was a bit shocked at some of my answers, leading to lots of laughs.
Overall, it was an entertaining puzzle book, well worth the price, considering it is a one-time experience. Our brains were stretched, and logic was strengthened during our training exercises. My family had to get past a bit of shock to see me writing directly into a book (because the horror!) and we had months of fun working through these puzzles.