3 out of 4 stars
Share This Review
Murdered by James Schannep is a choose your own adventure novel where you are traveling to Rio with a group of friends as a tourist for Carnival. You are quickly separated from your friends and stumble upon a murder. From that point, the choices begin and the story changes drastically based on the path you choose. But the goal is to discover the identity of the murderer and, as is the way in CYOA novels, try not to die in the process.
One of the joys of a CYOA novel is that you are, in essence, buying several books for the price of one. You can read the book, and then go right back to the beginning, make different choices, and read a nearly completely different book. When done correctly, it can lead to several fun re-reads. I believe that Murdered does this very well. There are several different story lines, and they are all enjoyable, with their own twists and discoveries. Some of the choices don’t particularly matter to the story, which was a bit disappointing, but the overarching plot was engaging and enjoyable.
The other thing that these kinds of novels have that others don’t is the sheer amount of times you can die. I absolutely love making the wrong decision and seeing the creativity of the author in how they kill their characters. And I love when I make what seems to be a reasonable decision and end up dying gruesomely. Probably because I was playing it too safe. I got through nearly my entire first read-through before dying for the first time, so that was disappointing, but this story does have plenty of bad ends. If you’re like me, you won’t be disappointed in trying to kill your character. But if you don’t enjoy dying multiple times, you will be glad to know there are paths through the book that don’t end in death.
The one thing that I did have a problem with in the book was that the main character is specified as ‘You’, as in, you the reader. You are not playing a character like ‘you are Buffy’ or ‘you are Jack, ace detective’. You are supposed to be yourself. But this character was very clearly male. As someone of a womanly persuasion, this did break my immersion at points.
It seemed, for the most of the book, that the author was trying to maintain a gender neutral main character, but the very first thing the main character does in this novel is get separated from their friends. In response to being separated from their group and lost in a large crowd, the main character goes into a dark, empty alley. Something no woman in her right mind would do.
If that was the only point in the novel that this happens, it would be easy to ignore, but there are several points where things like this happen. The main character makes references to boy scouts, or other characters implying that our character would be looking to pick up women. The other characters have no reason to believe the main character is a lesbian, so it really makes it seem like the character was written to be male. It doesn’t ruin the story, but it does make it feel like the author forgot that women may want to read this book.
Overall, I rate Murderer 3 out of 4 stars because the plot was enjoyable and it fulfilled exactly what you would want when reading a choose your own adventure novel, but found the main character’s obvious maleness to be distracting.
******
Murdered
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Like Sanderson6's review? Post a comment saying so!
