Customer Reviews

Danger at Anchor Mine (Choose Your Own Adventure #49)

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Danger at Anchor Mine (Choose Your Own Adventure #49) by Louise Munro Foley suffers from a lack of choices. On my first read through I went 8 pages before reaching an ending and had only one choice to make. If I had chosen the other path it was 10 pages before my next choice. I got unlucky my first time because there also are some potentially lengthy paths, though they also don't have a lot of choices. The plot has your character visiting her grandmother for the summer who operates a general store in a small Canadian mining town. There are rumors of one of the closed mines containing not only gold but also explosive booby-traps. These are rumors that pique your interest..

The problem with this book is that not much happens. Only one path leads you to gold and it's not in the mine. It's also a very short and unexciting path. Sometimes the mine in the gold and the supposed booby-trapped desk of one of the owners are treated as being real and sometimes they aren't. By the exact same characters. It depends on which path you take, which I found confusing as I was never sure if I was chasing after something real or just rumors. Also there's a canary who may or may not be of the supernatural variety. For whatever reason.

I've read one other book by this author and have found both her books a bit underwhelming (though this one even more so). Two of the longer storylines in Danger at Anchor Mine about hijackers are almost identical and lead to three almost identical (non)endings. There are a few of these non-endings where the adventure is post-phoned but you reach a THE END notice anyway. The author could've looped the storyline back into itself instead of having two identical storylines thereby freeing up the page count for new adventures. As it is, it feels like padding done by an author who didn't have much interest in the book she was writing. The author could've increased the amount of choices by fitting more writing on each page since sometimes pages only have a couple sentences on them. The book also could've used more villains than just a jerk cop and the aforementioned hijackers, though I did like the couple of times the author included 'gas devils' as they felt like a spooky menace.

Leslie Morrill is the artist and considering how little there is for her to draw I thought she did a pretty good job of selling the action. One instance of this is when a hijacker is described as shoving you into a chair it's drawn with his outreached hand knocking you back into a chair as it nearly topples over. It added menace to these hijackers. One problem I did have with the art is sometimes it looks like characters are smiling when they're not (like during a cave-in).

This book has a strong story line but some parts of it get rather dull. There are many other CYOA books that are better.