CASTLE OF FROME [Mass Market Paperback]

The fact of it being out of date and rare is not a good reason to avoid some of the best children's literature ever produced by Edward Packard, master storyteller and creator of the Choose Your Own Adventures franchise. Strangely written off as a fad from the 1980s today, these interactive books were a key part of many American youths' common experiences at the time. Relevant as Dungeons and Dragons to poplar game culture, these books merely represent the participation of a younger crowd. Totally timeless, the sci-fi and fantasy episodes of the series still charm anyone today who can find a copy.

The ESCAPE series is possibly the pinnacle of the entire range of interactive youth novels produced by Packard and company. Sustained complexity and inventiveness in these novels really addicts and involves the reader. The two series, Escape to Tenopia and Escape from the Kingdom of Frome, are linked sets of four fantastically illustrated illustrated paperback books, averaging 130 pages each, involving the reader in an epic journey through much tantalizing danger, adventure, and intrigue.

The books have a marvelous conceit that differs from the ordinary Choose Your Own Adventure novel: the opportunity to come to the same place geographically more than once, with time and experience being allowed for. In fact, it is vital in these books that one reach single destinations multiple times in order to move on.

These books also have several regional maps provided, scattered throuought the text, for exploring and navigating the different areas of very imaginative and inspired domains within each novel. Readers will need to make decisions based on the maps and on knowledge gained on the journey.

There is only one ending in each novel -- another difference from the multiple endings of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, but a valid one, seeing that the point of the story is the journey (the "escape") and not the cop-out, cheap (often the wrong-choice) endings of some of the lesser entries in other interactive books from the Find Your Fate and Choose Your Own Adventure series. The "one ending" insures that the reader will eventually make it out of each adventurous domain and into the next, finally moving on to other only imagined adventures after the fourth book of the series, but not without having faced much of what challenges there are to finding the way out of each domain. As with all interactive novels, of course, the reader needn't cover the entirety of the book to finish it, either, as many different choices are available to the reader on nearly every page as to what to do to continue. In these ESCAPE books, however, the reader is likelier to have to read a little bit more than the average Choose Your Own Adventure book though, simply because the puzzle of the books are essentially the point of every page: find the (only) way home.

Unfortunately, the ESCAPE novels did not continue past the two quartets, Escape from Tenopia (sci-fi) and Escape from the Kingdom of Frome (fantasy/medieval), but the lucky and the persistent of pursuers may well find these books hiding in used book stores. They are still miraculous creations, fully educational (in terms of the use of maps and the puzzle solving that readers must undertake) and exciting adventures for the 7-12 year olds of any day... and very nostalgic pleasures for those of us who were youngsters in the 1980s and early 1990s.

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