You may win $1,000,000. You will judge a man of murder.An eccentric scientist tells you he can read your mind and offers to prove it in a high-stakes wager. A respected college professor exacts impassioned, heat-of-the-moment revenge on his wife’s killer—a week after her death—and you’re on the jury. Take a Turing test with a twist, discover how your future choices might influence the past, and … past, and try your luck at Three Card Monte. And while you weigh chance, superstition, destiny, intuition and logic in making your decisions, ask yourself: are you responsible for your actions at all? Choose wisely—if you can.
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There are a few things I know for sure about myself: I’m a science nerd, I love believing I have some influence on the direction of a book and I enjoy discovering new authors, especially if they have the courage to reach out to me to get me an arc so I can post an honest review on the internet. I have to admit that I wasn’t entirely sure if this book would be my thing, but I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt.
I just finished the book and I have to admit that I’m still not entirely sure if I enjoyed this book. Let me start with saying that I like the start of the story. You’re participating in an experiment and a computer is gonna predict, based on brain scans, what you’re gonna pick. Even after already finishing this book, I’m still thinking about this issue. That’s a good thing. The idea behind this book, how much of our choices are conscious choices, is thought provoking.
But, the book also misses something. I think it’s a certain sense of danger, a certain sense of your choices having impact. I have to admit that I didn’t feel like starting the book again to make all the other choices, because it doesn’t feel like there’s gonna be another finale. I can make a few choices in the story and they do lead to a different path or a different ending, but it never feels like my choices have giant consequences for myself or would really get me into dangerous situations.
On top of that I felt like I had not enough choices. I understand that to tell a good story you can’t have the reader pick an option every three paragraphs, but in this case it really felt like there were only very few choices and quite often they were repeating choices, so choices I made before. A few times in conversations and then once for real. On top of that the story consists a lot of details that made my mind dazzle a little and weren’t always needed, in my opinion.
I’d say it’s a book that will make you think, but it lacks excitement and true impact to make a more lasting impression.
I was contacted by the author and asked if I was interested in “helping revive a genre” – with an opening like that, how could I help but say yes? Greg Hickey told me he was bringing back the “Choose Your Own Adventure” idea, but for adult readers.
I was immediately intrigued. I LOVED the Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid. (If you don’t know them, check out this amazing Medium.com article.) I grew up in their heyday and read them all. I loved being a part of the story. So often, I felt that young adult books had characters make ridiculous decisions. I was convinced I could do better as a character, and the CYOA books let me try my hand. Sometimes I did well. Sometimes, well, let’s just say perhaps it’s a good thing that I’m not a book character after all… But every time I found it entertaining and enjoyable. Letting readers be a part of the action extends the enjoyment and possibilities of a story, and isn’t that what immersive reading is all about?
I went into this book with (in hindsight) unreasonably high expectations. I wanted to relive my youth and younger reader experiences – which is folly at its highest, frankly, because there’s no way to really capture the magic of younger experience as an older person. As a result, I struggled with this book mightily…
Let’s be clear upfront: This is NOT Hickey’s fault. I love the idea of participatory reading for adults and think it’s one that has been a long time coming. I am delighted that someone is tackling this concept and trying to revive the genre. I think e-book formats are a brilliant way to do that, and think that the shortened attention spans that seem to be the name of the game lately for so many readers make the CYOA concept a marvelous choice for the current environment.
That being said, I definitely suffered from the expectation problem here… I went in looking for the constant-action, constant-choices format of the CYOA books of my youth. Hickey’s book reads more like regular fiction with occasional options. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t what I was expecting and so it felt slower in pace and less, well, exciting than I was looking forward to as a result. That is my issue, not the book’s, but it inevitably colored the read for me.
The Friar’s Lantern is a tale about a guy who finds himself in the midst of a bizarre experiment that could change his life – on many levels. It’s an intriguing concept and the choices as they are presented are thought-provoking and ethically interesting – as is the narrative text that sets up those choices. But be aware – this is more of a novel and less of an action story than the CYOA concept suggests. I suspect if I’d gone in as a cold reader, without expectations or history of the genre behind me, I’d have had an entirely different experience with this one. Unfortunately, I couldn’t distance myself from what I expected to find, and so the book didn’t work for me. I want to give this one another go, but have to give it some time to leave my head first…
If you’re intrigued by the idea, definitely give this one a go – but go in without preconceptions. You’ll be glad you did…
Thanks to the author for his patience with me on this one, and for my complimentary, obligation-free, review copy.
This is a very interesting book…
Our main character is producing a study on human decision-making. It starts off with an MRI and then goes forward to telling you that you have to make a decision between three boxes. One of the boxes will have $1,000,000 in it, one of the boxes will have $1,000 in it, and the other box will have nothing. We do not know which box has what. In a week’s time the main character must come back and make their decision. During this time the main character has to sit in jury duty in a case involving manslaughter. Throughout the week as they are serving jury duty they sit and ponder on the human decision-making process.
Okay first off, this book is very heavy on the scientific and legal terms and jargon. It also has extremely long-winded descriptions which make it difficult to make your choices when you are choosing your own adventure. I think that shorter descriptions and choices would have been preferable.
I also want to point out that this book is extremely difficult to enjoy the way that it was supposed to be enjoyed, in ebook format. Obviously it’s a little more difficult to flip through the pages when there are no pages to flip through. That really kind of killed the experience for me.
However this book is definitely well-researched. The entire book is very much your own study in human decision-making which I think was exactly what the author was trying to convey and, if that is so, he does it very well.
Overall this is a very interesting book. Not quite sure if I liked the choose-your-own-adventure aspect but I didn’t hate it either. I most definitely did not enjoy this book as an ebook but would have preferred a paper copy.
And I would recommend this in paper copy form to those who like a little bit of literary fiction.
I have never read a book before where you get to direct the story (my stepson calls it a “create your own adventure” book). Apparently this isn’t anything new (except to me) but I really enjoyed being able to choose the next path for the protagonist. I even chose one path and then went back and changed it to see what happened next that was different. I didn’t do this often, just a few times to see what would happen and then at the end (but of course there could have been multiple endings based on earlier choices). And because I read it on my Kindle (vs a book), it took me directly to the next part of the story based on my choice vs flipping pages.
I thought that part of the wording was strange…but now that I reflect on the book I realize that I am the main character/protagonist and it now makes more sense. I didn’t quite get the “you” when reading the book. I mentioned I had not read this type of book before!
The story itself is quite interesting – you start off choosing whether to be part of a science experiment that can decipher your decision based on a certain circumstance in a weeks time. So about half of your choices are based on whether you choose one or two boxes. The other portion of the book is that you have been chosen to sit on a jury for a murder trial and how you view the facts of that case leads you to make other choices when deciding the next path of your adventure.
I don’t know how the author created all the different scenarios or how many might intersect but it had to have taken a lot of time to write out each story and decide where to place the breaks for decisions by the reader.
I do wish the book had been longer or perhaps had a few more twists, but I imagine this was pretty labor intensive as written! I hope the author writes more books like this and perhaps if he notates them as a “choose your own adventure” book it might draw more people and they will understand that it is not like your normal book.