amazing, amazing, amazing puzzle. i have a knack for solving this kind of tricky lateral thinking puzzle far quicker than intended so the real test of a puzzle is whether it holds up even when that is the case. i cracked what was going on by puzzle five — i had solved the "normal" way through the first three, at puzzle four i saw all the month names and chunked the letter space up by month but was still confused at the may/yam interaction. this still gave me the click i needed for all the numbers in the bottom of each page (including the bottom right), so i went back to three and... couldn't figure it since i was looking at my previous naive solution and assuming those words were correct. i went onto five and the numbers really made it obvious that in some cases, there are weird diagonal connections. after solving it i went back to three and saw question mark and from there everything just broke open, i looked back at one and groaned seeing the rules and realizing what they meant. at this point the backwards words on the right side clicked and my last bit of confusion with the numbers at the bottom of the page resolved.
so, having discovered the logic of the whole book far earlier than intended, was the book a very rote solve? absolutely not, oh my god. i loved figuring the theme for 1 and 2, i particularly love the misdirect for 2 and the slow realization that it's zodiac animals and not just the random matching words we'd figured out, i loved that we had to re-populate the inkblots in 3 and that we used that sneaky little one i was wondering about at the bottom of the crossword, i was tickled that three became eight in 5, i LOVED the trick with the corners in 1, i had a great time using 11 to actually figure out the theme for one, which had still stumped me, as well as figuring out leftovers for 12 before even seeing 0! oh yes, and who can forget zodiac/zodiac??? i laughed out loud upon picking up on that one. realizing that parts of our metapuzzle were backwards was delightful, and i was grinning from cheek to cheek upon realizing that the final phrase is both in the gaps and as a contiguous region that we have to circle. this is EXACTLY the way a good metapuzzle should collapse in on itself at the end of a sequence.
good god. this was an incredible thing to play. you really nail the way that a puzzle is supposed to smoothly and cleverly twist and turn both on the macro level and the micro level. i'm so thrilled with every second that i spent on this!
(admittedly, 7-10 were straightforward given much of the above, but it was fun observing the way that the book tutorialized for people who hadn't yet figured the mechanics out)