Citymaze!: A Collection of Amazing City Mazes

Grade 3-6-This unusual title is not wholly successful as a maze book or as a survey of the world's great cities, although it tries hard to be both. It is extremely appealing visually, with a brightly colored bird's-eye view grid of the buildings and streets surrounded by drawings of some of each location's most famous sights. The text on the opposite page presents an overview both of the city and of the object of the maze. The streets are filled with traffic, parades, tour groups, excavations, and other obstructions, around which readers must navigate to get from point A to point B. The drawings along the borders of both pages show additional points of interest. Some of the mazes are more successful than others, and similarly, some drawings reveal more of a city's character than others. After a few pages, the patterns become apparent, and the cities begin to look alike. The answers appear at the end of the book. One difficulty is that the scale is inaccurate. Furthermore, often an attraction mentioned in the narrative is not part of the map at all, but simply one of the drawings along the border. The result is one of name association with a place, but without much sense of context. Libraries with patrons who can restrain themselves from penciling in the solutions might find an audience for this book, but they had better have the resources to support the requests for more information that will surely come.
Linda Greengrass, Bank Street College Library, New York City
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gr. 3-5. First published in England, this attractive book contains 12 mazes, each representing a significant part of one of these cities: New York, Beijing, Sydney, London, Venice, Moscow, Delhi, Madrid, Istanbul, Paris, Cairo, and Rio de Janeiro. The left-hand page of each spread presents a brief description of the city and an even briefer story, which ends in a challenge to find a route through the colorful maze on the facing page. The maze is a simplified, pictorial map based on a well-known part of town. The last section of the book, illustrated in black and white, includes maps tracing the correct routes and notes on features of architectural and historical significance. Since phrases (in the main body of the text) such as "From the magnificent romanesque Sacr{‚}e Coeur to the modern glass edifice of the Pompidou Center" will be all but indecipherable to most children young enough to enjoy the mazes, consider buying the book for its miniature ink-and-watercolor illustrations, intriguing maps, and maze games, not for its textual introduction to cities. And if children happen to learn something along the way, that's fine, too. Carolyn Phelan