More stories to solve Book

Stories to Solve was wonderful, so I was quite looking forward to George Shannon's second collection of folk tales with clever solutions, solutions that you are supposed to be able to figure out yourself, then turn the page to see if you got it right. Aesop's tale of the "Crow and the Pitcher" is a good example of the type Shannon uses - here's the guts of the story, now turn the page to see how the crow got her water!

However, "More Stories to Solve" wasn't nearly as good as the first collection. More confusingly written, several stories had solutions that were too similar, and... I hate to say it, but there seemed to be an overly strained effort to go multi-cultural. For example, one of the tales is a variant of the Grimm Brothers' "The Peasant's Clever Daughter" from Mexico (*), except with a worse ending, and skipping the middle section that would have offered another clever series of tasks whose solutions could be guessed. (The "Peasant's Clever Daughter" is the one where she has to meet the king "neither naked nor clothed, neither walking nor riding, neither on the road nor off it", and I leave it to you to guess how she managed.)

There's plenty of good riddle tales he could have used from all over the world; I don't think there's a need to substitute something not as good in order to avoid the Grimms.

2.4/5. Might've been higher if I was not so disappointed.

(*) Or Portugal? Somewhere in South America? Review is from memory.