Best Puzzle Books for Middle Graders

Highlights PressMost puzzle books give kids something to fill in. Escape Rooms! dares them to solve their way out. Young sleuths ages 8–12 will explore six richly illustrated worlds, from a dinosaur planet and wizard’s castle to a haunted cheese factory and spaceship, searching for hidden objects, cracking codes, solving logic puzzles, and following clues. Every answer matters and may unlock the final escape. From Highlights, this hardcover adventure turns screen-free puzzling into an immersive experience kids can tackle solo or with friends. Can they outsmart the mysterious Escape Artist and make it out of all six rooms? Puzzle books fall into many different categories. Some are stories featuring puzzles, others are collections of puzzles waiting to be solved, and I suppose some might be a singular tome that cannot be opened or deciphered until a series of riddles is completed. (Actually, I’d like that book, please.) As a kid, I adored word searches and the rebus puzzles that were copied on the ditto machine as a special treat in elementary school (yes, I was born in the 1900s), but it wasn’t until the last decade or so that I realized completing a jigsaw puzzle could actually be ...