Pick a story: a pirate + alien + jungle adventure by Sarah Coyle. Illus. by Adam Walker-Parker

With three stories and lots of endings, the choice is up to the reader in this choose your own adventure style of picture book. A new series awaits eager adventurers as they are offered not just a pirate but a jungle and an alien all in one book.

When Vincent’s dog, Trouble disappears, it is natural to think that she has been kidnapped by pirates or an alien or perhaps lost in the jungle. There are plenty of places in the first double page where she could be hiding or lost, and readers are directed to check them all out. Then a choose your own adventure begins, as the storyline follows three different paths for the readers to choose their journeys from. Each page has a choice to make and once that choice is made, an instruction to take a path to a page which will tell you more. Watching the YouTube clip by Sarah Coyle is most enlightening as it shows the path she took putting the story together. Using a blackboard and paper clips, post it notes and string, amongst other props, she pieced her story together emulating the choose your own adventure stories she read and loved as a teenager.

This picture book and the next in the series, Pick a Story: A Dinosaur Unicorn Robot Adventure, will captivate younger readers as they explore the links and twists and turns as directed to new pages taking note of clues on each page. Full of humour, the text will engage the readers as they follow the paths laid out for them, and be intrigued with the plethora of places shown in the illustrations. Each page presents another funny scene with a variety of different beings in it, the readers will laugh out loud at the strange mix, and funny situations they all find themselves in.

Find out more about Adam Walker-Parker here.

Themes: Aliens, Pirates, Dogs, Humour, Choose your own adventure.

Fran Knight