Choose your own adventure books!

For one of my other classes, I was doing an analytical paper about Choose Your own Adventure books. So for obvious reasons, I went to Snell and checked one out.  The one that I picked up is called The Search for Champ.  I remember my third grade teacher reading the class these types of books, and my recollection was different from how I perceived them now.  When I was younger, Ii always thought they were much longer and much more  challenging. My mom and sister and I read the Harry Potter series when I was in third grade, so looking back, there was a noticeable reading level difference between what my teacher had the class read, and what I read in my own free time.

CYOA books are good for learning how to read, but they are definitely not "Literature". Since they are so short, especially because there are so many different plots and endings, there is no room for character development. They are all therefore shallow and the same throughout all CYOA books. Even other typical children's books have some sense of personality, none of them have flat characters. I found The Search for Champ to be very dumb.

The plot is around this girl and her sister who visit their grandparents for the summer and want to see a mythical sea monster named Champ while exploring the vast lake. The first decision is which route they will take and from there the plot differs dramatically. What I didn't like about it is how they all ended in such a strange manner.  They either found the sea monster, found hidden treasure/ rare gems, or met a sea goddess. All of them have an exciting, happy ending where they discover something incredible. In none of the endings they failed.  Because the reader gets the chance to change their mind and read it over again, I think it would have been fine for one of the endings to be boring where they just go home having found nothing. Also, since the author has to come up with so many variant plots and endings, they all seemed ridiculous. It was more of a quantity over quality type of thing.

Whereas this might have worked on third graders, this genre will not fly for any other age group. This is unfortunate because there are many video games where it is choose your own adventure, and there was even the Netflix original movie Bandersnatch.  I think that this genre could be hugely successful for an older audience if the quality of writing improved. It is fair to say, I will not be reading another one.