Artist: Anne Bentley
Maker and Year: Galison,
Count: 1,000 pieces
Final size: 27 x 20″
Piece Type/Variety: Ribbon cut, one shape
Piece quality: Average
Skin irritation: Yes

I remember now why I don’t care much for Galison puzzles. They hurt my skin. Not enough to wear gloves this time, but I did wash my hands frequently. Pieces are all the same (well, horizontal ones are narrower and vertical ones more square, so at least you can differentiate that way) and I had quite a few false fits- including one that made getting the border right take quite some time. Someone before me had got stuck in the same spot, I could tell because all the knobs looked stressed. Doing the areas of all one flat color- the background sea and green land, became a trial-and-error thing. I put together the signs first because I wanted to leave the fun part for last and end on a good note- and the animals were fun to do. One piece (off a fish’s nose on the left) had the color layer missing on a knob, I made a little patch. Another piece missing entirely, so I made a replacement.

Tested it visually on my college kid and his partner: took them a few minutes to find it!

Assembly:

swap with a friend

Artist: unknown
Made by: Mai Mai Xiong Toys Factory
Count: 500 pieces
Final size: 14 x 20″
Piece Type/Variety: Straight ribbon cut, one shape
Piece quality: Average
Skin irritation: Yes, high

This puzzle annoyed me, but the more irritated I got, the more determined to finish it. The pieces are fairly large (and so is the lettering on the back! compared to these).

There is no shape variety. Lots of false fits. Lots of places where I actually made use of those letters, flipping groups of pieces over to check if I had them in the right spot. The last four pieces I had to do this, because I couldn’t figure out their placement. Not my favorite way to puzzle. It’s got a very shiny, plasticky surface, which caused a lot of glare. That plus the dull colors with very little contrast in much of the picture, and quite small details, made it hard to do. I tried to put the roadways together first, that was actually kind of fun. Made me think very differently. Brain challenge. Then had to peer at each individual piece and try to find its match on the picture guide (poster actually just a bit bigger than the puzzle itself, was helpful) to put in place. Also not my favorite way to puzzle.

The buildings along the main roads are so distinctive,

I felt that if you knew this place (it’s in Colorado) you’d recognize what the restaurants, churches, grocery stores, schools, etc all were. There’s ziplines and a hike to the peak and a water tower and ruins and cliff dewllings and some kind of rock formation on the hillside. All very intriguing. I thought at first wow, if you lived here, you could to find your actual house among all those little houses on the edges of town.

Then I realized there were a limited number of houses, shrubs and trees- repeated in different arrangements across the picture.

Eh. I wanted to do this one just because it was so very different from most of my puzzles, I found that intriguing. But I was so glad to be done with it.

a thrift store find

by Holly Goldberg Sloan

Twelve-year-old Willow is a genius, and an outsider. She loves facts, is obsessed with medicine and disease (often wanting to tell strangers of her observations), and counts by 7’s in her head when distressed or upset. She’s miles ahead of other kids at school, and challenges the system just by being herself. Then she suddenly finds herself an orphan. This is a huge blow because she was already adopted- so it’s like she’s been orphaned twice. And she has no friends to help her through it. She gets assigned to a school counselor who is very bad at his job (and I really objected to his way of classifying problem kids until in the end Willow herself criticized it, then I felt okay about that), and through him inadvertently meets an immigrant Vietnamese/Mexican family, and slowly starts to make some connections. It’s a very odd combination of very different people. Willow herself is surprised at what her new friendships expose her to, seeing the difficulties others face in their lives, the very different way some families live, or make do to get by. She starts to find herself fitting amongst them, and making something more out of what little they have together.  I liked this one a lot. What really surprised me was how it touched me, things I could relate to that I didn’t at all forsee. Willow used to have a large, beautiful garden where she did experiments with plants and soil. After her loss, she no longer had any interest in gardening, but then started jogging with someone and started to find satisfaction (even happiness) in the physical activity. I’m right there. I no longer feel my passion for gardening, but I have a new interest in skating, so those parts of the story really hit home with me.

Rating: 3/5
378 pages, 2013

Artist: unknown
Made by: Aimpuzzle
Count: 148 pieces
Final size: 12 x 11″
Piece Type/Variety: Random, very high variety
Piece quality: Good
Skin irritation: None

I liked this wooden puzzle quite a bit more than the giraffe by the same company. I think because the color scheme is nicer, even though still crazy wild fantasy design. No goat ever sported fur in such pinks, purples, blues and greens. And in spite of the pastel color hues, this one looks rather sinister to me, my brain kept reading these yellow shapes on the chin as irregular fangs.

It has fourteen whimsy pieces- a big cat, the company logo, a dog (?), butterfly, two sea turtles, a rabbit, elephant, sheep, otter, anchor, lizard, dagger and one more animal I can’t identify.

Not sure if this is considered the small or medium size- if you look up this puzzle on their site, the small has 120 pieces and the large, 180. I counted mine three times- it’s right in the middle. Maybe I have an older one and they changed the piece cut? That’s what I’m guessing. I don’t have the box, so I took a picture from online to show top of post. And noticed the colored pattern is slightly different.

Some very thin shapes in the pieces, but seem sturdy enough.

Reverse:

This is the last wooden puzzle in my collection, for now. Assembly:

from my grandmother

Artist: unknown
Made by: Hartmaze
Count: 253 pieces
Final size: 11.5″ diameter
Piece Type/Variety: Random, very high variety
Piece quality: Excellent
Skin irritation: Very minor

I can’t believe I found this nice wooden puzzle secondhand. It has a lovely scent of fresh wood, the picture is very bright, and the pieces are a nice sturdy thickness (made of three layers).

I looked up the painting online to try and find out who the original artist is, no luck there. Definitely a Chinese work of art, it’s from a fable. There’s lots of other images depicting the phoenix with a hundred birds. I tried to count them on my puzzle, got up to eighty but realized I missed a few as when I went to take closeup photos I saw more that were very small in the background. All that bold red makes it very hard to see some things. All the other images I found online were of other people showing off this puzzle. That’s how I found that some of them got a better picture guide. Mine’s rather small, as shown below. I had to actually use a loop to see where some of the birds were in the picture.

The image on the box is even smaller (that’s my thumb!)

However the other side of the insert has a map of all the piece shapes, this is more decent size. I don’t know if I’d ever use this to solve it (but then, I never imagined I’d find a use for lettering guides, so maybe someday, who knows). I was a bit annoyed to see that when some people showed their puzzle online, their picture guide was the size of my piece map. Would have been a lot more useful.

Just have to share some details, as I tried to recognize the bird species. There’s a peacock-

Two cranes-

A pair of geese and a rooster (his red body and orange beak blend into the background)

A penguin, an owl-

A kingfisher and a small toucan (it’s just above the phoenix to the right, between its body and wing)

What I think is a cockatoo, and a hoopoe-

This one looks like an cattle egret (but I think it’s probably not), and some kind of shorebird-

I think this is a bird of prey-

and these make me think of magpies, though they’re probably something else-

You can tell from those details above, there were quite a few pieces had the picture layer chipping off the corners. No puzzle dust per se, but a scattering of color flecks left behind on my board. I don’t know how much use this puzzle had before coming to me, but with more re-workings it seems the picture will start to wear off at the edges. There are no whimsy pieces, but I didn’t miss them. The quirky, intricate shapes were plenty challenging.

If I work it again, I think I’ll do it on this black board. It stands out so much better. (In my next-to-the-last progress photo, there are still 12 piece gaps, but it’s hard to tell).

Finally, the assembly:

a thrift store find

Cat

Artist: unknown
Made in China
Count: 71 pieces
Final size: 5 x 8.5″
Piece Type/Variety: Random, very high variety
Piece quality: Average
Skin irritation: None

Rainbow colors on a decoratively patterned animal, so typical of these wooden puzzles. Still fun to do. I had this one on my lap at night, lamp caused odd shadows which I tried to correct using photoshop (you may see some artifacts of that). And the colors are kind of dull on the puzzle, that made it hard to get good pictures, too. I pushed the brightness some. The included ‘poster’ in this case is bigger than the actual puzzle, also brighter and more crisp. Quite a lot of the detail on the actual puzzle is dim and blurred, not easy to see clearly.

The whimsy shapes included fox, rabbit and cats (apologies this photo came out blurry)

four different octopuses, fish, dolphin and whale, a ghost (?), seahorse and crab. Why so many ocean creatures I don’t know. I like it better when the whimsy shapes are on a similar theme to the puzzle.

I didn’t notice until I flipped it over upon completion, that this one has the same type of regularly spaced whimsies and curly-hooked connection pieces as the Thanksgiving Puppy. I’ve heard tell that lots of these cheap wooden puzzles made in China are actually all produced by one company, then sold under different names/labels. I guess this proves that.


Smallest knob ever on this one. Also note that there’s something strange about this cat’s toes. And what’s that little blob under the end of the tail? I don’t know.

from local swap group

by C.S. Lewis

It was good to read this one again. I don’t think I’d opened a copy of it since my teen years. It was never among my favorites of the Narnia books, perhaps because there’s so much battle stuff going on. Although less than I had remembered. Warning for some SPOILERS if you haven’t read this yet.

So- the four main characters, children in England just on their way off to boarding school, get suddenly pulled back into the magical world of Narnia. It turns out they were summoned, but they don’t know why at first, or by whom. They find themselves in a castle ruin in a tangled forest. They free a dwarf who was supposed to get executed, and from him learn that a thousand years have passed since they were last in Narnia- and much has changed. Narnia has for a long time now been ruled by an outsider nation of Men, the Telmarines. Young Caspian is next in line to be king, but suddenly learns from his tutor, that his uncle plans to kill him and rule instead. So Caspian flees and gathers supporters- from the Old Narnians, the ones whose country was taken over. The talking animals, centaurs, giants, fauns, etc. Even walking, talking trees. A lot of the current people don’t believe these creatures still exist, they’ve been living so long in hiding. Much less do they believe in the stories of Aslan the Lion. In fact a lot of the story is about who believes or doubts- when the four children are tromping through the woods with the dwarf to try and meet up with Caspian’s forces, Lucy suddenly sees Aslan at a distance on a hill, and feels sure he is beckoning them to go that way. After some argument, it turns out that nobody believes her, so they go the original path, and it all goes wrong. Difficult and puts them in danger. They have to backtrack and take Lucy’s suggestion after all. When they do meet up with Caspian, they overhear his followers arguing too- some of them believe Aslan will return to save them (they have no hope of winning against the uncle’s larger army), others think they should summon the White Witch out of the past, or call on other evil creatures for support. Among the four children too, they are often questioning each other’s abilities. In the end, Peter the oldest steps up to fight Miraz in singlehanded combat, but when he fells the older knight, the enemies all jump forward to attack. Then Aslan shows up with the trees behind him. So they are saved by him, but only after they had done their utmost themselves, and come together in a unified front (and expressed belief in the Lion). Everyone comes around to this, even the sour dwarf who was reluctant and critical all along.

I think it is the characters who make this story come alive for me. How the four siblings talk amongst themselves, their arguments about faith or not, the bickering about where to go, all feel so realistic. And the little gritty details about their stay in Narnia- it’s not at all easy. They don’t have any supplies when they land in the forest- for quite a while they’re eating nothing but apples and the occasional fish. The walks are long and hard and everyone is tired and argues more because of it, and some of them are petty and unpleasant to each other. They get muddy and trip on things and so on. But it all turns out right in the end, and there are other parts so lovely it’s hard to comprehend the descriptions of the scenes (or they are just not described very clearly to me). Lucy and Susan dancing with the talking trees and the Maenads (I had to look up what those figures actually were, the author was rather subtle about it in this book!), riding on Aslan’s back once again, re-visiting places they had loved and seeing how much has changed. They succeed in their mission to put Caspian back on the throne, and then after seeing most of the invading peoples out of Narnia, are sent by Aslan through a magical doorway and tumble back into the railway station to go to school.

Just the right way to end an adventure, ha.

There were some little things I had completely forgotten, or glossed over when I was a kid- like the fact that apparently the Telmarines are descended from pirates that accidentally found their way into Narnia hundreds of years ago themselves? I had no recollection of this! Makes me more interested to keep reading the series, see what else I notice so differently reading them as an adult. (A lot of people point out the dearth of female characters, how little the children actually do to help Caspian, and annoying references to Christian theology via Aslan, but none of that bothered me still).

Rating: 3/5
186 pages, 1951

Artist: unknown
Maker: Quordle Puzzles
Count: 80 pieces
Final size: 9 x 9″
Piece Type/Variety: Random, very high variety
Piece quality: Average
Skin irritation: None

I always had my doubts about this puzzle brand. It was decent as far as wooden puzzles go. The pieces are an okay thickness, but some of the interlocking shapes quite small! If it got much smaller, I’d be afraid of many breaking when taking apart/ re-assembling this puzzle.

The whimsy pieces are fun- including flowers, leaves and foxes (quite a lot of muted browns in the image, so I didn’t have some of these actually flipped to the reverse)

one unicorn, rabbits, cute kittens and puppy, teddy bears,

birds, a chicken and owl, elephants, I think that’s a hedgehog, and a triceratops!

It was a pretty quick puzzle to do. A lot of the placement was obvious because most of the interior pieces seemed to have an edge of a whimsy shape on them- I started thinking: this puzzle is all whimsies with the random pieces in between them and those curvy bits to interlock. Reverse side: I was pretty much right. The whimsies are very evenly spaced across the whole puzzle.


There’s a picture guide insert in the box, but it’s exactly the same size as the image on the box, so I don’t know what the point of that was.

a thrift store find

by E.D. Baker

This is the first book of the series that includes A Prince Among Frogs. Which I read out of order, so now I am remedying that. It was a fun read. Similar in theme to Frogged. Princess Emeralda doesn’t want to meet the prince her parents are trying to introduce her to (arranging a future marriage) so she sneaks out of the castle and goes to her favorite spot- the swamp behind the castle. Where she meets a frog who demands a kiss, saying he’s really a prince. Emma is reluctant, but finally gets talked into kissing the frog- and is turned into one herself. Said prince is still a frog, too. They can’t imagine why the reversal didn’t work how it was supposed to, and the only way to find out is to locate a witch. Preferably the one who transformed this prince Eadric in the first place. Getting anywhere is difficult, being frogs they are in constant danger from predators, curious or mean boys, dogs, and any larger animal or human just walking around. Emma has to learn how to hop and swim and (ugh!) eat insects. She is constantly pestered by this Eadric to kiss him again, but refuses, worried that it will work some other transformation. They journey to find the witch, only encounter a different witch instead, who wants to use their frog body parts for a spell. They’re trapped with a bunch of other creatures in her cottage and with some help from a bat, finally get free again. Emma discovers that she actually has a knack for magic, and can be braver than she ever thought. Eventually they make their way back to Emma’s castle, to seek help from her aunt who is also a witch. (So I found out- yes, this fantasy world has plenty of witches, and the magic runs in families, including Emma’s). There’s lots of funny asides, like the dog who was once accidentally turned into a duck and is now (being a dog again) mortally afraid of them. There’s also a horse that got turned into a dog, and an otter that was once a man (seems witches enjoy turning anyone who annoys them into animals), and a nasty-tempered fairy. Emma and Eadric slowly build a friendship as they go through their trials as frogs, and at the end it looks like this might even turn into a romance someday.

Borrowed from the public library.

Rating: 3/5
214 pages, 2002

Artist: Lesley Anne Ivory
Maker and Year: Ceaco, 2010
Count: 300 pieces
Final size: 11 x 15″
Piece Type/Variety: ribbon cut, average
Piece quality: average
Skin irritation: very mild

I liked this one a lot, too. It’s just as busy with the flowers as Motley, but with all the colors it was easier to do. Relaxing.

It did have even more puzzle dust, though! And that’s after someone else has done these puzzles at least once- all the bags in the set were opened and re-sealed. There was a lot of dust all over the board I spread the pieces out on. And when I crumbled up the puzzle to put away again, another little heap of dust produced. So the pieces are still shedding.

From the Ivory Cats boxed set.

a thrift store find

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All books reviewed on this site are owned by me, or borrowed from the public library. Exceptions are a very occasional review copy sent to me by a publisher or author, as noted. Receiving a book does not influence my opinion or evaluation of it

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