Eh.... Honestly, I don't give a shit who reads the book next year and I don't want to write anymore about it.
Instead, let's learn about R.A. Montgomery.
This friendly old gent was born in 1937, which makes him 75 years old. He went to Williams for his undergrad, and went to Yale and NYU for graduate skill. You can dig on the man for his simplistic writing style, but it's certainly planned to be so. In addition to his academic experience, he also has a lot of 'adventure' experience. He served in the Peace Corps, he's been on an ambulance crew, hiked in the Himalayas and served on ski patrol in Vermont. I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that R.A. isn't just some random guy who couldn't write so he decided to write kids books. He's a highly educated, adventurous guy that wanted to write books that were more interactive than the standard children's fare. The whole style of the book series is planned carefully.
He's also not into cheesy morals, like the end of every Fairly Oddparents episode.
A lot of people ask, and have asked over the years, is there a moral imperative behind the choices that are presented in Choose Your Own Adventure and the answer is: actually, no. Life throws you many curves. The choice you make might very well have a moral tone to it. Should you go in and save your friend in the ice fall now, or should you wait? Waiting may very well end up in his death, so if you choose to rush ahead, that’s a choice based on “good morals,” but in CYOA this doesn’t necessarily net a successful ending. This is accurate to the decisions you make in life.
~R.A. Montgomery
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| http://www.gradyhendrix.com/r-a-montgomery-interview/ |
So even though the CYOA series limits your choice by offering you choice, at least we can respect them for not trying to plug our youngins full of unrealistic, clear cut, moral lessons.
Thanks, Ray.
I got this information from an interview here: http://www.gradyhendrix.com/r-a-montgomery-interview/
That was one of the things I found interesting when I was reading and also when I was making my flowchart: the choices weren't clearly "good" or clearly "bad." They were all defensible from one point of view or another. Often, the only distinction was that one choice would be more "risky" and the other more "cautious." In a way, I think that is a better way of mirroring how choices are determined in real life than simply providing a good and a bad choice. And regardless of whether the reader always chooses cautiously or adventurously, there is no guarantee of a good outcome. You can take the risk and save a man's life and end up no better or worse than if you had gone back to your car to call the police. This, too, is true to life and the choices we make. No matter how badly we want to think that there is a cosmic reward system for good deeds and a punishment system for bad deeds, that simply isn't the case. Even in this innocous form, it's a bit of a bleak lesson for children to learn, but I agree that it's better than lying.
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