Choices

I think House of Danger should definitely stay on the syllabus. It's both fun to read and shows an example of a book where the manipulative techniques used by the author are much more transparent. This is useful to the class because it shows how sometimes books have very little room for interpretation by the reader and have a much more simple purpose of just teaching kids how to make decisions. While Packard lets the readers think that we all have a choice of the main character's fate, reality is that the different paths and outcomes have already been set in the book. While kids reading this book probably wouldn't be aware of this, analyzing it in a college course after reading much more complicated books makes the predetermined outcomes of each decision more apparent, especially from the misleading warning at the beginning. Also while I read the book, I was never fully satisfied with each outcome I would read after I decided which route to take. Each time, I would go back to the decision that had lead me there and try to find all the alternate endings. I don't know how I would have read it differently if I were a kid reading it instead, but I saw the book as more of a game designed by the author than a story.

Similar to what we talked about in class today about taking on two perspectives, I find that the book forced me to read it as both a children's game that I was playing and from an engaged reader's perspective for a college course. Both left me with reading the many different outcomes and becoming more and more aware that I really didn't have any control over the consequences of each choice I made. I realize now that essentially the author was guiding me to choosing what pages and sections of the book to read in a particular order. While I was reading it though, I felt like I had control and chose which parts to read and endings. Here lies the manipulation. In the end, the author is the only one controlling any text, while the reader's only choice is to be aware of the manipulation and what to do once you have realized the game that the author has created for the readers.