By Bill Doyle
Your child gets three tries to survive the sinking of the Titanic, and pulling it off means tearing, folding, and drawing right on the pages.
Before the ship leaves port, your child picks who they are. A first class passenger who can go anywhere on the decks. A crew member minding a wealthy family and their dog. Or a stowaway who isn't supposed to be aboard at all and has to draw their own way onto a lifeboat. Then the iceberg hits, the way it always does, and getting off the ship runs straight through the book. One page tells them to rip it out, so they rip it out. Another wants folding to reveal what's behind the bulkhead. Another is half blank, waiting for them to draw the thing that gets them clear. Three characters means three separate runs at it, and any of them can end with your child not making it.
Your child likes the idea of choosing their own path but won't sit still for a page of solid text to do it, and this is the book for that. Everything the old Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks asked a reader to picture, Sarah Sax has already drawn, so there's an illustration on nearly every page and the words ride light on top. It goes past choosing, though. The book doesn't move until your child does something with their hands, and that something is tearing and scribbling, which they've been scolded for their whole life. A child who won't sit for a novel will spend an hour on this, because it never once feels like being read at.