Surf Monkeys

Choose Your Own Adventure
by Jay Leibold

I never thought I'd give a book meant to be all fun a low rating, but this one had me rolling my eyes and impatient to finish. Read it with my kid at bedtime last night, not at all interested to try another storyline on my own. Mostly because it doesn't really seem to follow the format of Choose Your Own Adventure books I recall. Usually they have a page or two setting up the premise, and then nearly every page there's a choice at the bottom. This book had many many pages of setup- and not all tidy in the beginning either- I was flipping from front to back to middle to font again, without ever having made a choice. I got annoyed and fanned through the pages looking at the lower margins- surprised to find that nearly all of them said Turn to page -- instead of If you choose-- or Do you choose-- ? It's only got nine possible endings with pages and pages of straight reading to get to them, and I bet none of the threads intersect each other. The storyline is fine considering it's aimed at kids- you're spending the summer on a California beach with a laid-back uncle who lets you do whatever you want, learn surfing and try to chum up with a surfer gang when a friend goes missing. There's possible shark attacks, friendly dolphins, suspicious men on an oil rig offshore and bad weather to be dodged while you try to find out what happened to Jorge. There's just not enough choices for the very specific genre this book is supposed to be. I was annoyed because it didn't meet my expectations, and not interested enough in a surfer detective story to try again.

Borrowed from the public library.

Rating: 2/5                144 pages, 1992