Adrienne Raphel’s obsession with words and wordplay started early.
“I’ve always been a word game person ever since I was little,” she said in a phone interview. And she was competitive, too. Frustrated that she couldn’t beat her family at Boogle, she took what her family called a “quantum leap” forward with the help of an online version of the game.
“I went from having to be handicapped to having to give the rest of my family a handicap in like two because I blitzed my way through Yahoo Boggle,” she said with a laugh.
Raphel’s book “Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them” comes out in paperback on Tuesday. The moment will be marked by a virtual event that evening hosted by Prairie Lights in Iowa City.