My Lady's Choosing (Kitty Curran and Larissa Zageris)

My Lady's Choosing: An Interactive Romance Novel
Kitty Curran and Larissa Zageris
Quirk Books
Fiction, Gamebook/Historical Fiction/Humor/Romance
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: As a plucky yet penniless woman in Regency-era London, your prospects seem limited; indeed, it seems all but decided by your employer, the cranky old dowager Lady Craven, that you're to marry a wealthy acquaintance of hers. Of course he has enough money to keep you comfortable for the rest of your days, but you don't love him, and the thought of bearing him an heir is, well, unbearable. But your best friend, the Lady Evangeline Youngblood, is determined that you can do better.
Will you find a way into the frozen heart of the sharp-tongued Sir Benedict Granville, bane of the ton singles scene? Are you brave enough to win over Captain Angus MacTaggart, who hides the scars of war behind a devotion to orphans? Will you risk the dark secrets shrouding the mysterious Lord Garraway Craven, who scarcely leaves his crumbling manor Hopesend? Or will you take a chance at a different kind of heat by following Lady Evangeline to Egypt on a grand adventure? The difference between happily-ever-after and spinsterhood lies in your choices, so choose with care - or choose with passion.
It all starts, as it so often does in Regency England, at a ball...

REVIEW: I've mentioned before that I grew up devoted to the Choose Your Own Adventure books, and I still have a soft spot for interactive fiction. So, when I needed a palate-cleanser read and I found this title through Overdrive, it seemed like a potentially amusing diversion. Unfortunately, "potentially" was generally as close as it got to true amusement for me.
Written in a style deliberately derivative of generic Regency romances (the ones that know they're just vessels for soft-core titillation, and so don't invest much, if any, effort in characterization or plotting or logic, even as they couch seductions in dance-around words that waver between humorous and simply terrible without ever approaching sexy), the tale takes "you" on a long, winding journey through every genre trope the authors could think of. And therein, I believe, lies the chief problem: the book lacks any focus, tackling Highland romance, pseudo-Jane Austen society seductions amid parlor room verbal jousts, Gothic angst, exotic adventure in Egypt, ghost stories, werewolves, spy escapades, missing wives and returning old flames as plot devices, even venturing into bisexuality as the Egypt-themed branch of the story has "you" fall for Lady Evangeline as well as numerous locals, male and female. It's too big a bite to swallow without losing any semblance of story thread - and even a humorous interactive story needs some manner of story thread to keep the reader interested; otherwise, it collapses into a heap of forgettable and repetitious twists, as this one unfortunately does. "You" weave around, back, up, through, and all over the place, with innumerable opportunities for hook-ups wise and foolish, with everyone from the main cast to the postman. Where you end up is less a matter of making smart or sensible choices and more a matter of luck of the draw, though most endings seem to see you with someone. (I admit I didn't reach every ending.)
If you read a lot of Regency romances, are willing to poke fun at your own genre, and you aren't looking for any follow-through, you're likely to find this more amusing than I did. For me, unfortunately, the joke wore thin early on, though I've read far worse.

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Treasures of the Forgotten City (Danny McAleese and David Kristoph)

Treasures of the Forgotten City
(The Ultimate Ending series, Book 1)
Danny McAleese and David Kristoph
Ultimate Ending Books
Fiction, CH Adventure/Gamebook
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: As treasure-hunter Donovan, you're on the trail of the legendary lost city of Atraharsis; the treasures rumored to be hidden there may be the key to saving your great-uncle's legacy and making your own name and fortune. Using the hundred-year-old journal of the only man who ever claimed to see the place and live to tell the tale, you plunge into the unknown. Can you survive the city's dangers and solve its riddles, or will you be another victim of Atraharsis's many traps?

REVIEW: As a child of the 1980's, I grew up on Choose Your Own Adventure books, and I still have a weakness for multi-ending tales. The good ones create entirely new stories every time you read them, while the poor ones merely plod along a fairly linear track with random dead-ends. This book isn't one of the bad ones, but it's not quite one of the good ones. "You" are a fairly shallow character, far more interested in riches than in actual exploration; seen through this lens, the lost city is a fairly bland jumble of sandswept ruins and random passageways whose descriptions become repetitive. ("You" and your sidekick are also both boys - don't girls ever get to explore lost cities, here, or is it assumed girls won't read these books?) The book includes riddles and some math puzzles to work out, though on the Kindle edition the latter are rather redundant (not to mention impossible, as the screen shrinks the number tables it asks one to use to illegible size), as one just clicks on through the answer link; at least the word riddles, one has a chance of making a wrong choice. Dice or some other random number generator are also suggested, though I'll admit I just picked a random choice. I'll also admit that I didn't follow every branch or reach every ending; though there are dangerous, even fatal endings, several just looped back if you made a "bad" choice, and for some reason the adventure never really felt adventurous enough to lure me in for enough tries to reach all the endings. The target age would probably find it entertaining, but I've been spoiled by nostalgia.

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