This book is an adult Choose Your Own Adventure novel, and as such I’ve been excited to read it ever since I heard about it. It’s been a loooong time since I’ve read a CYOA, but they were always a favorite at the Scholastic Book Fair or to borrow out of the Bookmobile more years ago than I care to think about.
I’ll start with the premise of the book. Marsh’s life is in a rut. She’s middle-aged, divorced, in a dead-end job, and wondering where it all went wrong and what happened to the hopes and dreams she had when she was younger. After Ren, her first real post-divorce boyfriend (an old high school boyfriend she reconnected with after not seeing or speaking to him in decades) breaks up with her, she decides to apply to be the star of season 3 of the reality television show All This and More. Thanks to quantum technobabble, the star of the show gets to explore how their life might be different if they had done things differently. What if they’d asked that person out? What if they’d chosen a different major, or a different college? Studied abroad? Stood up to that bully? They spend a season exploring possibilities, and at the end their perfect life is re-integrated into reality and they get to live their happily ever after.
This setup obviously lends itself well to a CYOA book. We the reader get to make a lot of the decisions Marsh faces in the show. Marsh’s first choice, for example, is between going back and choosing to not drop out of law school when her daughter was born, or going back to the night before Ren broke up with her and making sure that doesn’t happen. A major change that will alter the trajectory of her entire adult life, or a recent tweak to adjust things going forwards?
The choices in the CYOA books of old came fast and furious. Not the case here - I had to make fewer than 10 decisions over the course of the book. And the author tells you that if you don’t want to make a choice and just read the book as a normal novel, the first choice is always the “default.” I consciously avoided what I used to do with CYOAs, which was jump around, backtrack, or sometimes even flip through, find an ending I liked, and then backtrace and figure out how to get there, with two exceptions. At one point I caught that a choice was going to send me back to a section I’d already read; rather than loop, I went back and went the other way. And for the final choice in the book (where you’re given three options, not two, and the author says there is no default) I read all three.
The structure of a CYOA book in an adult novel works fairly well, though not perfectly. Different sections can be read in different places, and need to be able to fit together whatever order the reader encounters them. This mostly works very well, which is a credit to the author, but there were a few places the seams were showing. And there were a number of places I felt rushed, or the story felt undeveloped, which was clearly a consequence of trying to fit multiple books (essentially) into one. But on the whole I think the author did a great job.
What about the story itself? This part of the review will purely reflect my experience of reading the book. Obviously if you make different choices than I did, your experience will be different, and I’m not planning to re-read and explore different paths.
I myself am 40. I don’t particularly want to re-do my life, but I think everyone has their “what if?” imaginings. So I related to Marsh quite a lot, and there was definitely a lot of projection and stress when making these choices. Way too easy for me to imagine the choices I would be given if I were the star of All This and More. Made even worse since the first few choices, at least for me, led to pure misery porn as every decision Marsh made ended in disaster of one sort or another.
Luckily things turned around and the book became both fun and exciting as Marsh goes from paralegal to high-powered lawyer to wildlife photographer to actress to knife-throwing super secret agent. But there’s also things that keep getting stranger as the season goes on. She keeps seeing Ren again and again, in situations where it makes no sense. She keeps seeing other things repeating beyond what can be coincidence. By the end, this had gone from misery porn to exciting thriller I couldn’t put down.
All that being said: I’ve previously read Peng Shepherd’s The Cartographers, and my review of that book could be summed up as “this doesn’t make sense but I love it anyway.” There’s something similar going on here, where the science fiction simply doesn’t make sense in ways Shepherd avoids addressing. Which is fair enough; science fiction doesn’t have to make sense if you’re able to gloss over it effectively (see the “Heisenberg compensator” from Star Trek).But there were a few issues that kind of stuck on me and were niggling at me the entire book. The main one was that All This and More is supposed to be one of the greatest television phenomena of all time; how does that square with the star of the season re-integrating their “perfect” life in at the end? How do their kids feel about it? Their significant others and colleagues?
The other thing that bothered me has to do with sex and consent. There’s nothing like rape or assault in this book; it’s never even hinted at. But Marsh obviously encounters other people in the different iterations of her lives, and sometimes she has sex with them. Sometimes it’s her ex-husband, or Ren, which, fine. But it was hard to keep my brain from going other, darker places. The people in the different realities with Marsh are often people she knows from her “real” life. Imagine if someone you know was the contestant, and you’re watching an episode where they hook up with your alternate reality self? How does that work? Questions of consent here are very murky. Shepherd sidesteps the issue entirely, which is fine, but it also kept niggling at me.
But those complaints aside, this was fun both as a book and as an experience. A Choose Your Own Adventure isn’t something I would want to read all the time, but it was fun to experience the format in a serious adult novel.
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