As I regard the shimmering cover of R.A. Montgomery's House of Danger, I wonder what the best way to approach reading the "whole book" is. Can I get away with reading only one of the possible 20 endings, and claim that as the reality I have chosen, the only one I will accept? After all, the first page warns me: "Do not read this book straight through from beginning to end!" Maybe I am being manipulated by that disclaimer, but I've been down the road of Choose Your Own Adventure before and I know that the book will not make much sense if I try to read it cover to cover. I decide to flip through to the good part: pictures. Ghosts, giant eggs, aliens... I wonder if there is a way to cheat and read backward, to ensure that I survive the journey.
These alternate realities put me in mind of a labyrinth. Unfortunately, no matter which path I choose the end result is the same: I'm still laying in bed, no richer, no dead-er, and not a different species than when I started reading. And though I get to choose which page I flip to next, the choices are limited. I'm not writing my own story, just picking from a drop-down list of possibilities. Of course, you could say that the same is true about life. Our decisions are all influenced and exist within context. Even if I was writing my own adventure, what I wrote would be influenced by my past experiences and things I'd read. It couldn't ever be completely new.
Aura is a novel about the past coming into the present, about history and present existing simultaneously. Aura and Felipe are doomed to act out a pre-written script, on into eternity. But in the same way that the novel's second-person narration tells the reader exactly where they have been and where they are going, House of Danger, despite the way it is advertised, gives us very little choice at all.
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