And the variety puzzles keep on coming! And, with them, comes another round of thanks to Alex Boisvert, who generously makes the tools to create them available on his site, Crossword Nexus. This type of puzzle has been called “Seven Sages”, but Alex is attempting to rebrand them as “Stained Glass”; I like that and think it’s an apt descriptor of the puzzle’s appearance, so that’s what I’m going to use.

Each answer in this puzzle is seven letters long and encircles the correspondingly numbered space, reading either clockwise (+) or counterclockwise (-) as indicated. The starting point of each answer is for you to determine. When the grid is correctly filled in, the letters in the outermost ring (reading clockwise from answer 1) will spell out a quote from “Matilda”, one of Roald Dahl’s novels for children.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can print the pdf below or solve it online here.

Let me know what you think!