A friend was looking to make room on her bookshelf and asked if I was interested in this book. It seemed like the right age level for my 10 year old and she likes slightly creepy stuff so this seemed perfect. What I didn’t realize at the time was it is a choose your own adventure book. Yesterday I was looking for a quick read and as this had Frankenstein in the title it was seasonally appropriate. Opening it I realized the nature of the book and went, “Huh, I remember never getting into these types of books in middle school. I should give it another try.”
Now I know why I never got into them, they frustrate me greatly. Within in four pages I was dead. So I went back and took a different path, also dead within a couple pages. Tried another path, not dead but not satisfactory since it finished the story in about eight pages. Then I had difficulty back tracking to figure out another path. In the evening I sat down determined to get through all the alternate versions of the story with my tab post-it notes to help me keep track. I went through at least ten more endings but even with the post-its had difficulty going back and finding each branch. By bed time, I was frustrated that I had not been able to find all the endings that I could see as I passed them by. And I had a distinct lack of satisfaction due to each version of the story being so short. Clearly this is a genre not for me.
Caveats: Someone my age was not the intended audience, so the shortness of the stories my not be a problem for a middle grade reader. The artwork was pretty and handled the grisly nature of the story (reanimating corpses) appropriately for the target age range, which is why I gave it a two star rating instead of one.
The ten year old picked up the book this morning so I’m curious as to what she will think of the book.
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