Book Review :: The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman
Review by Kevin Brown
The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle, Shechtman’s lengthy title and subtitle might make readers think they know what they’re getting when they open her book, but they would be mistaken. While the crossword puzzle is certainly one of Shechtman’s interests, there is much more going on here, for good and ill, depending on what readers are looking for.
If one wants the focus to remain on crossword puzzles, she has an interesting perspective, given that she published her first New York Times crossword puzzle when she was nineteen, and given that she is female. Despite the male-dominated landscape of the CrossWorld today, Shechtman points out several important women who helped shape the development of the puzzle. Similarly, she points out the continued sexism of that CrossWorld, not merely in the fact that most puzzle creators are male, but in the clues and solutions one would see.
If the reader is only looking for a book on crossword puzzles, though, they’ll be disappointed to find that Shechtman spends only about half the book, at best, on that area. Instead, she has written what she refers to near the end of the book as a “memoir wrapped in a cultural history.” The memoir aspect of this book centers around her struggles with anorexia, connecting that to her fascination with crossword puzzles. This part of the book also pulls heavily from feminist theoreticians and Freudian analysis, as Shechtman uses both of those approaches to understand who and how she is. Those sections might push a reader looking for a history of crossword puzzles.
That said, the combination largely works. Shechtman clearly lays out the connections between gender and crosswords and anorexia, helping readers to see how she puzzled her way through her life, in more ways than one.
The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle by Anna Shechtman. HarperOne, March 2024.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrites
