HAMSTER BOY & CHAMELEON GIRL SAVE THE DAY

Can kids with superpowers solve mysterious occurrences around the school?

As the story opens, habitual troublemakers Arturo Denton and Liz Ardinvale find themselves in Principal Webb’s office once again. She sends them to help cranky science teacher Mr. Crust clean the animal cages in the lab. When a strange device zaps them with super electrotransfer rays, they both begin to display super animal powers, and after swearing them in as animal-powered superheroes, Principal Webb enlists their help to search the school for missing items. Now Hamster Boy and Chameleon Girl, they follow a trail of destruction to the lair of The Hermit—discovering that Mr. Crust had used the ray on himself and a hermit crab! Can the intrepid superkids use their new powers to save the school (and maybe the world)? Ginns and Stevens offer another very silly and puzzle-filled stand-alone adventure in the ongoing Puzzlooies! series. Sixteen puzzles of various types punctuate the tale, with answers offered at the close (some puzzle solutions don’t show how the answer was derived). There are mazes, word searches, and even ones that require cutting up a page of the book to build a solution. A break in the center offers a smattering of facts about superheroes and animals as well as some jokes. Terrana-Hollis’ grayscale cartoons depict Liz as Black and Arturo ambiguously; the Latinx heritage suggested by his given name goes unexplored.

Foolish fun that also exercises the gray matter.