Review by Booklist Review
Shechtman's freewheeling debut, "a memoir wrapped in a cultural history," ping-pongs among an account of her recovery from anorexia, her experience as one of the very few young female constructors of crossword puzzles, French literary and psychological theory, and the complicated stories of some of the women involved in crosswords from their beginnings in the early twentieth century. An assistant to Will Shortz at the New York Times for two years and now a Fellow at Cornell University and the constructor of crosswords for the New Yorker, she offers unusual insights into women like Margaret Farrar, the founding editor of the NYT crossword, and lesbian linguist Julia Penelope, who designed puzzles with explicitly feminist clues. Shechtman also considers the fraught question of what makes a word "puzzle-worthy" and the impact of new software on the creation of puzzles. Arguing that "crosswords have always been artifacts of power," she suggests possibilities for change within their essentially conservative nature.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Shechtman, a crossword compiler for the New York Times and the New Yorker, debuts with a rigorous yet fleet-footed exploration of the crossword puzzle's feminist legacy. Profiling four women pivotal to the crossword's evolution--Ruth Hale, Margaret Farrar, Julia Penelope, and Ruth von Phul--Shechtman tracks the crossword from its 1913 invention, through its rising popularity in the 1920s and '30s, to its eventual widespread adoption by newspapers and magazines. Noting that women were long the primary creators of crosswords, Shechtman explains how the rise of computer technology that transformed the way crossword constructors work has led to the field being taken over in recent decades by men. Pairing this history with a ruminative memoir that chronicles both her love for crossword construction and her youthful struggles with anorexia, Shechtman draws effortlessly on feminist theory and psychoanalysis to ultimately make the astute observation that both her eating disorder and her crossword-constructing habit stem from a need for control--of the body and language. Throughout, Shechtman investigates how gender, race, and politics affect crosswords, though her self-analyzing narrative often pushes back against this line of inquiry ("The question risks a double embarrassment: trivializing the serious stuff of politics or, maybe worse, taking trivialities too seriously"). By turns incisive and roving, this teases out hidden connections and forgotten histories that will enthrall readers. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
For those who have ever wondered why early New York Times crosswords shied away from words such as "enema," Shechtman's book has the answer. (Margaret Farrar, the crossword editor from 1942 to 1968, believed puzzles should activate minds, not bodies.) That dichotomy of body and brain gives Shechtman (a crossword maker in her own right) a fascinating framework for discussing her own story of anorexia, which she astutely describes as a desire for structure and control, analogous to the crossword's rigid format. Her investigation of the sociocultural history of crosswords delves into women's search for meaning and control in a world that often denies them access to both. She uncovers the major crossword contributions made by Farrar, Ruth Hale, Julia Penelope, and Ruth Franc Von Phul, whose puzzles became favorite mental health tools for many. VERDICT As a gripping study sprinkled with puns and puzzles, this book encompasses the reasoning behind Shechtman's own search for meaning while describing the constraints and histories of women who changed the narrative about wordplay. The book also soundly cracks the code for feminists puzzling over how wordplay fits into gender politics.--Emily Bowles
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A memoir of crossword puzzles and self-discovery. Essayist and crossword constructor Shechtman makes an absorbing book debut with a feminist history of crossword puzzles interwoven with a revealing examination of her experience of anorexia. In "a memoir wrapped in a cultural history," the author reflects candidly on the connection between her puzzle-making and self-starvation. Both began when she was 15, and both represented "efforts to make my mental strength, the willed intensity of my interiority, obvious." As evidence of intellectual prowess, crosswords have long attracted women--as constructors, solvers, and editors. Shechtman highlights Ruth Hale, a feminist activist in the 1920s and '30s and founder of the Amateur Cross Word Puzzle League of America; Margaret Farrar, the founding editor of the New York Times crossword; Julia Penelope, a queer activist and linguist, author of Crossword Puzzles for Women; and Ruth von Phul, who became "a press sensation" after winning the first two crossword puzzle tournaments in 1924 and 1926. Shechtman interweaves their profiles with a chronicle of her seemingly intractable eating disorder. Although the culture fetishized thinness, paring her body was not her only goal; not eating, she believed, was evidence of supreme, exalted self-control. Devising crosswords felt similar: "The crossword constructor makes chaos out of language and then restores its order in the form of a neat solution." Her puzzles were published in major venues, and in 2013-2014, she served as assistant to Will Shortz, puzzle editor of the New York Times.In a field dominated by nerdy white males, she has worked to identify racist, sexist, and cultural blind spots. Like the women she profiles, Shechtman uses crosswords "to negotiate the stereotypes, or expectations, of how a woman ought to look, act, and think--in the 1920s or 2020s--sometimes conforming to them, and sometimes subverting them." A forthright self-portrait and perceptive cultural critique. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
