A Bibliophile’s Nostalgia: Choose Your Own Adventure
I’m back again with my blog post series to revisit some bookish things that give me all the nostalgia feels. Today, I’ll be talking about the Choose Your Own Adventure series.
Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children’s gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader becomes the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character’s actions The series was based upon a concept created by Edward Packard and originally published by Constance Cappel’s and R. A. Montgomery’s Vermont Crossroads Press as the “Adventures of You” series.
One of the most popular children’s series during the 1980s and 1990s, selling more than 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998. The series has been translated into 40 languages total! The series was relaunched by Chooseco will begin to reissue titles by Packard in August of 2025.
What made these books so exciting for readers was the unknown. You had multiple choices and each one had a butterfly effect that could have a good or bad outcome. I loved flipping back and forth through the pages wondering how the story would end! I think the appeal of these novels that garnered the most attention was the fact that you got to create your own story in a sense. It fueled your imagination while also allowing you be fully immersed in the plot.
I’m so glad to see these books are making a comeback for new generations and young readers! If you’re looking for a more in-depth history about the rise and fall of these books I recommend this video from Secret Galaxy:
Have you read the books before? What versions did you like to read growing up? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
Ah, lovely! Ours here were the Fighting Fantasy series by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy – they started coming out when I was 10, so exactly the right age for me, and I had several of them.
Liz! That series looks epic! And I love the cover art as well. Happy to see books such as these become more popular again.
I remember trying one of the Goosebumps one as a kid, but I didn’t like it much, because I wanted to know ALL that happens, which should have excited me since the book’s format means I could reread it several times and have a different experience each time. But instead it annoyed me.
I can understand that too. I feel like depending on what version of the choose your own adventure novel you got some of the endings were lackluster. That just made me more determined to get a better ending.