The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eric Berlin creates puzzles for all ages, from kids to adults (his crosswords appear often in The New York Times). He is a member of the National Puzzlers' League and enjoys creating puzzle events for schools and other groups. He lives in Milford, Connecticut, with his wife and two children.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

WANTMOREPUZZLES?

ANSWERS

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The Puzzling World of Winston Breen

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

A division of Penguin Young Readers Group.

Published by The Penguin Group.

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G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Published simultaneously in Canada.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berlin, Eric.

The potato chip puzzles / Eric Berlin. p. cm.—(Puzzling world of Winston Breen)

Summary: Winston and his friends enter an all-day puzzle contest to win fifty thousand dollars for their school, but they must also figure out who is trying to keep them from winning. Puzzles for the reader to solve are included throughout the text. [1. Puzzles—Fiction. 2. Contests—Fiction. 3. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.

PZ7.B45335Po 2009 [Fic]—dc22 2008033698

eISBN : 978-1-101-02479-9

For Rita and Joel Berlin

Also, a world of thanks to Katherine Bryant, Ana Deboo, Francis Heaney, Dan Katz, Susan Kochan, Lance Nathan, Trip Payne, Scott Purdy, William Reiss, and Will Shortz.

ABOUT THE PUZZLES IN THIS BOOK

This book contains quite a few puzzles. You can solve them if you want, although you don’t have to solve them to enjoy the story. Most of the answers can be found in the back of the book. Some of the puzzles are so important to the story, however, that the answer will appear on the next few pages. You’ll see which ones those are when you get to them. Note that you can’t really skip those puzzles and come back to them later, because you’ll learn the answer almost immediately. Take a few minutes to try them, and then continue reading.

And if you don’t want to write in this book, just head over to www.winstonbreen.com. There you can download and print out all the puzzles. Happy solving!

CHAPTER ONE

WINSTON BREEN DIDN’T know why it was called “study hall.” They weren’t in a hall, and hardly anyone studied. Sometimes you’d find kids finishing homework due the next period. You could tell that’s what they were doing—they had a wide-eyed, racing-the-clock air to them, and they gripped their pens so hard that blood stopped flowing to their fingertips. But this was the last week of school, and there was no more homework. Kids sat in little clusters, talking semi-quietly, occasionally bursting into laughter, which would attract a glare from Mrs. Livetta, the study hall monitor. A couple of kids were reading, and one girl, with hypnotic concentration, was covering her desktop with elaborate graffiti.

Winston, of course, was solving a puzzle. He kept a couple of puzzle books in his schoolbag at all times. There had been a day earlier in the year when he found himself puzzleless in study hall, and Mrs. Livetta refused to let him go to his locker. With nothing to read and nothing to solve, he sat there for a while in utter boredom. In fact, that was the day he discovered that the letters of BOREDOM can be scrambled to make the word BEDROOM. That was a pleasing discovery, at least.

Now he was always prepared. He clicked a few times on his mechanical pencil and doodled in the margin while he thought.

In a word square, words read the same both across and down. In the following two puzzles, solve the clues to create the word square.

This last word square has five letters in each word . . . and the clues aren’t given in order, so you’ll have to figure out which word goes where.

(Answers, page 239.)

“Winston!” Mrs. Livetta all but screamed in his ear.

Winston jerked like a freshly caught fish, nearly falling out of his chair. The other kids in the study hall laughed. Mrs. Livetta was standing in front of him, hands on hips.

“Wh-what? Yes?” Winston tried to regain his wits. He knew what had happened. Sometimes he became so absorbed in a puzzle that the world around him simply faded away. Mrs. Livetta must have called him once or twice from the comfort of her chair and then, when Winston didn’t answer, said his name louder, and then louder still, and then she finally came over and yelled at him. The next step might have been to hit him with a textbook.

The kids laughed again, but Mrs. Livetta wasn’t laughing. “You are wanted down at the principal’s office. Didn’t you hear the announcement?” She pointed at the loudspeaker on the wall.

Winston reddened. It was worse than he thought. The loudspeaker, which was indeed loud, had barked his name, and he hadn’t heard it at all. Wow. That had to be some kind of record.

Wait a minute—the principal’s office wanted to see him?

“Why does the principal want to see me?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Livetta said. “It’s a loudspeaker—you can’t have a conversation with it. Ask when you get down there. Now go!”

Was he in trouble? He couldn’t see how. Was something wrong at home? His mind reached in every direction at once as he walked through the empty hallways down to the main office. As he rounded the corner to the school’s large central lobby, the intercom system crackled and chirped. The school secretary said once again, in the voice of an old lady robot: “Winston Breen, please report to the principal’s office. Winston Breen, to the principal’s office.” Boy, whatever the reason was, they sure...