Very tough
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I enjoyed this book immensely, and if you like Smullyan's style, then you will too. However, I found some parts of it more difficult than other books I own by the same author. Perhaps the novice reader should choose a different book?
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Yet another great puzzle book from Smullyan
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If you are new to Smullyan and his puzzles this book is not a bad place to start from. You will find a great deal of logic problems regarding truth-tellers and liars, such as: "Person A says that at least one of A and B is a liar (never tells the truth). Is A a liar? And what about B?". This is the simplest type of puzzle; many are much more challenging.
If you already read some of Smullyan's books, be assured that this one has the same appeal. Some of the knight-knaves puzzles are similar to the ones in "What is the name of this book?" and "Alice in puzzle-land" but there are important variations such as day-knights and night-knights and there is also some challenging metapuzzle.
The second half of the book leaves the island of knights and knaves to enter an enchanted forest of talking birds. Though I found this part somewhat difficult to get in, once you work carefully your way through the first chapter you will find it fascinating. At the end you will have solved a lot of interesting problems and explored a subject called combinatory logic which has important applications in modern logic. As Smullyan puts it, "what could be better for a puzzle book?"
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