By R. A. Montgomery
Your child's friend has vanished on Everest chasing the Yeti, and the choices they make hunting for him lead to twenty-eight different endings, some of them their own death.
Carlos is gone. He went up Everest looking for the Yeti and never made it back to base camp, so your child flies to Kathmandu to find him. That missing friend is what sets this one apart from a lot of the early Choose Your Own Adventure books, where there was rarely a reason to keep going. Here the reason has a name. Then the mountain starts handing your child decisions. Take the trail or take the ridge. Trust the guide or set off alone. Wait out the monsoon or climb straight into it. Each string of choices runs down to one of twenty-eight endings, and the book is upfront that they range from finding Carlos alive to falling to your death. Along the way there are crevasses, collapsing ice, and something huge moving in the snow that your child might never get a clear look at.
This is the one to reach for when your child needs a point to the whole thing. The Cave of Time drops them anywhere in history for no particular reason, which is a fair chunk of its charm, but a child who keeps asking why am I even doing this can drift out of it. Here they're looking for a friend, and every choice gets weighed against that. It's still thin, still fast, still written in the second person, so there's nothing to slog through and an ending is never more than a few pages off. And the Yeti carries a lot of the load. The creature might not be real, but Everest is, and that gap is the kind of thing an eight-year-old will want to argue with you about after they close it.