If you are in the puzzle world online, you would know about this puzzle. This is a release from a company called Laurence King Publishing, they make these collage style puzzles called “The World of…”
I’ll be honest, this particular one – The World of Yayoi Kusama – is really the only one that I was interested in. There are so many by this point, Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, Bridgerton, Jane Austen, The Brontes, the list goes on. Some of these do sound like they’re up my alley, I love Agatha Christie novels, Jane Austen, sure!
My criticism about the rest of these puzzles is that they’re quite dark and brown, they feature mostly buildings and little map style narrative images. They just don’t speak to me like this one does. Am I super familiar with the art and life of Yayoi Kusama? No, but do I absolutely love the vibrant colour and geometric fun of this image? Yes!
In looking up more about her, she seems like she’s lived a very interesting, complex life. Her story is pretty incredible and honestly much too long and complicated to cover in a short blog post. Anyway, I’ve just always thought that this puzzle looked like so much fun.
I did love it, I decided to assemble the tough part first, the red and white polka main central focused spotlight of her standing in front of a halo of white and red polka dots. That was tough to be sure, but engaging. Then the fun part came with piecing together all the highlights of some of her most famous trademarks and exhibits over the years.
The quality was so-so, there were the odd false fit matches but I caught those pretty quickly so it didn’t bother me. The illustration was very clearly outlined, I noticed fairly quickly if something was hanging out in the wrong spot, so again, not the biggest issue. However, if this was a darker puzzle image, that could be a larger problem and would be more annoying, confirming that I don’t really need to seek out the other images from this company.
The only one I would consider picking up, if I ever com across it in a thrift shop, would be The World of Dracula, I think it would be a fun Halloween puzzle. Just saying.
This is a 1000 piece puzzle and my copy was missing just one piece along the border.
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