The Lost Tribe

Choose Your Own Adventure #23

by Louise Munro Foley, Paul Granger (Illustrator)

You have come to New Zealand with a team of archaeologists to search for the Lost Tribe of Fiordland—a Māori tribe no one has seen for 200 years. You are deep in the wilderness when suddenly you're caught in a hunting snare...

Genres: Choose Your Own Adventure, Fiction, Childrens, Gamebooks, Fantasy, Adventure

116 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Josiah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Here was the Choose Your Own Adventure debut of Louise Munro Foley, who went on to write nine books in the series, including a few of the more interesting concepts. Your uncle Charlie invites you on a trip to New Zealand in search of artifacts from the Ngatimamoe, known to history as the Lost Tribe of Fiordland. Two hundred years ago the Ngatimamoe were pursued by a rival Maori tribe into the wilds of Fiordland and never heard from again. They're regarded as extinct, but you believe they may still linger in the Fiordland. You, Uncle Charlie, and his associate Murdoch arrive ready to set up camp, but by happenstance you are left by yourself for a while. While exploring, you spot a boy dressed in the old Maori style, a simple reed skirt. Is he a member of the Lost Tribe? Should you speak to him?

Staying mum as he and his white dog run past could put you on course to a wild adventure. When a primitive-looking Maori hunter catches you and demands you follow him, you soon find you aren't free to go back to camp. The hunter leads you through a secret tunnel to a village of people dressed like himself and the boy you saw. You have found the Lost Tribe, and they aren't pleased. The Tohunga, a tribal priest, believes you are the fulfillment of a prophecy that one day a person from outside the tribe will save them from encroachment by modern society. He might order you locked inside the House of Gold, a room decorated floor to ceiling with the precious metal. Even if you escape, locating the tunnel you took to get here is difficult, the pathway packed with threats to life and limb. If anyone from the Lost Tribe considers you a danger to their way of life, they'll kill you without hesitation. Remain in the House of Gold and you meet Wiremu, the boy you saw near the story's beginning. He says the elders plan to put you through three tests to judge whether you are the one spoken of in the prophecy of the falling star, but will you play along? The Lost Tribe has treated you with suspicion and occasionally violence, but you'll have chances to win them over. You may persuade them to open up as they have to no outsider in the past two centuries.

"He who runs from opportunity travels backward!"

—The Tohunga, The Lost Tribe, P. 110

Speaking to Wiremu and his dog when you first see them in the Fiordland shows clearly how panicked he is to be observed by an outsider. If you follow when he runs, a volcano eruption may end your life. Avoiding that trap, you meet a young woman in traditional Maori garb who tells you her father is gravely ill. You can ignore her and try returning to camp, but you'll run across Wiremu, tied up and being threatened by three Maori men. Be inventive enough and you'll scare the aggressors into releasing him, but Wiremu still isn't ready to talk. If you stay with the young woman you learn she has second sight, and seems to know much about your journey thus far. Her demeanor is mysterious, but if you make it back to camp, Uncle Charlie may have an explanation of who she is. Will you survive your encounter with the mystical side of the Ngatimamoe?

The Lost Tribe is a book that lacks focus. You came to New Zealand at Uncle Charlie's kind invitation, but interact with him almost like an adversary; when you learn vital things about the Lost Tribe, you often permanently conceal them from him, and in the story branches you do tell, he writes you off as delusional or a liar. The tribe itself seems prone to violence and intolerance for those unlike themselves, cocooned in a mixture of pagan spirituality and barbarism that leaves me doubting whether discovering them was worth the trouble. Still, this book offers pretty good internal continuity with a few notable exceptions, so I'll rate it one and a half stars. I can't quite call it fun, but it's a reading experience I would repeat now and then.

[Remo · Rating 4 out of 5]

La serie de Elige tu propia aventura es, literalmente, un clásico de nuestra infancia. He releído algunos, años después, y me parecen un poco cortos de miras, limitados en las posibilidades, pero cuando tenía 10 años cada uno de ellos era una maravilla lista para ser explorada hasta que hubiera dado todo lo que tenía dentro.
Al final siempre sabías que ibas a recorrer todos y cada uno de los caminos posibles. La emoción estaba, por tanto, en ganar y pasarte la historia al primer intento. Si no podías, pues nada, seguro que en el intento 18 acababas encontrando el camino. A veces los autores iban "a pillar", poniéndote los resultados buenos detrás de decisiones que eran claramente anómalas.
Recuerdo haber aprendido tanto palabras como hechos y datos en estos libros. No nadar contra la corriente cuando quieres llegar a tierra, dónde colocarse cuando un avión va a despegar, un montón de cosas interesantes y un montón de historias vividas, decenas por cada libro, que convirtieron a las serie en una colección fractal, donde cada vez podías elegir un libro nuevo entre los que ya tenías.
Llegué hasta el tomo 54 y dejé de tener interés por la serie, pero la serie siguió hasta superar los 180 títulos. Tal vez mis hijos quieran seguir el camino que yo empecé. Si quieres que lo sigan, pasa a la página 7.

[Daniel Acosta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is great if you want a short story that you can easily read in your free time. This book is basically a book where you can spchoose what you want to do in the book, in this case, I died early in the book. This book is kind of realistic because I don’t know if the Maoris ever existed but this book was fun to read even though it ended kind of early for me. Hopefully you will last longer than me.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's hard, as an adult, I think, to fairly rate a book meant for youngsters. I think if Goodreads had been a thing when I was in elementary school, I would have given this a 4-star rating. I liked the particular adventure (going to New Zealand to search for a lost Maori tribe), which is why I chose to revisit this particular Choose Your Own Adventure book for my Pop Sugar challenge. The different possibilities all made sense and there was an appropriate balance of good and bad outcomes.

[Nate · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit racially insensitive, but after spending a fair bit of time in New Zealand myself, I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would.

[Matías Bertucci · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amaba el concepto de "crear mi propio desenlace". Lecturas entretenidas de mi niñez.

['Nathan Burgoine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure books, and constantly borrowed them from the library. I owned a few, too, and would mark little pencilled notations on all the endings I managed to reach in my own copies (I'd tuck aside a piece of paper for the ones from the library). When I was nine and ten, these books got re-read so many times it was unreal, and they paved the way to me wanting to write, too, as sometimes I got annoyed at an obvious, missing option.

[Vege90 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es un libro que tiene muchas decisiones y poco contexto a comparación de otros libros de elige tu propia aventura y eso es a mi gusto lo que mas me gusta del mismo aunque no es muy difícil de sacar el final bueno.

[Spider the Doof Warrior · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actually, Maoris are not even lost...

[Mikana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the choose your-own-adventure books during my early years, and believe these are a great set of books for those who are new to reading their own books.