(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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