By Edward Packard
Your child ducks into a cave, walks out in the wrong century, and picks a way through forty endings, most of which kill them off — the first Choose Your Own Adventure ever written.
Your child is hiking in Snake Canyon near their uncle's ranch, ducks into a cave to get out of the sun, and comes out somewhere in history. That's the whole setup, and it takes two pages. Then the book stops and asks them something. Go left or go right. Follow the man or hide from him. They pick, the book hands them a page number, and they flip to see what it cost. Sometimes they land in Pompeii. Sometimes on a ship with Columbus. Sometimes with the dinosaurs, which goes about how you'd expect. There are forty endings and most of them kill your child off in a paragraph. Then they put a finger back on the last choice and take the other road.
A lot of children who bounce off novels are really bouncing off the waiting: the pages of setup, the names to hold in your head, the nothing-happening-yet. This book hands them a decision almost right away and never makes them wait again. It's written as 'you,' so there's no one to keep track of and no world to learn first. The person in danger is your child. It's also short enough to reach an ending in ten minutes, so they actually finish something, and for a child who's never finished a book, that's the whole prize. Then they go back and do it differently, which is still reading even though it's the same book.