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8.26.2018  Adventure story for kids includes maze puzzles

Children’s author Travis Nichols, who grew up in Texas, has produced a delightful book that kids (and adults) will find challenging and fun.

Maze Quest (Chronicle Books, $12.95 paperback) is an adventure story that incorporates more than 25 creative maze puzzles to solve along the way. These are not just your everyday mazes, either.

For example the first maze is a child’s messy room littered with toys and clothes and other objects. The reader has to walk through the maze to get to the Quest Office, where the adventure begins. In another maze, the reader must negotiate the relentless waves of the Sea of Sickness to get to a small island where the story continues.

Right up front, Nichols warns readers, “If you choose to give up, put down this book and walk away.  Ask a teacher or family member to recommend a book about people sitting quietly in a restaurant trying to choose between soup options.”

On the other hand, “To insist that you’re up for the Quest, thrust your fist in the air and yell, ‘I’m up for it!’ Then keep reading.”

Good luck on your Quest!

Decorated: Danger 79er: The Life and Times of Lieutenant General James F. Hollingsworth by James H. Willbanks (Texas A&M University Press, $32 hardcover) tells the story of one of America’s most decorated soldiers who “led from the front.”

Born on a farm in Sanger, Texas, Hollingsworth drew praise from Gen. George Patton as one of the two best armored battalion commanders in World War II and received the Distinguished Service Cross three times, as well as four Silver Stars and six Purple Hearts during his career, which includes commands in Vietnam and South Korea. Hollingsworth died in 2010 at age 91.

Mysteries: Self-published Texas novelist Lynn Vadney features a 66-year-old widow as her main character in Hattie’s Secrets: A Collection of Mystery Stories (Desert Willow Publishing, $15, paperback).

The book is divided into three sections, each one pretty much self-contained, featuring Hattie Johnson, whose domineering husband has died a few months earlier. With him gone, Hattie is free to make new friends, develop new interests, and discover heretofore hidden talents.

She makes use of these new gifts in helping solve a double murder, a local ghost story, sagging morale at the town’s major industry, and an espionage case.

Vadney employs a technique that I really like: At the beginning of the book she lists the characters who will be appearing in the stories. So, if you’re reading and you can’t remember exactly who Kirk Montrose is, you can go back to the list and refresh your memory. I did that (at the back of the book) with my own “Coleman Springs” stories a few years ago, and I wish more authors would, as a courtesy to readers.

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Glenn Dromgoole writes about Texas books and authors. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Read his past Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life here.