Fire!

Choose Your Own Adventure: Young Readers #28

by R.A. Montgomery, Frank Bolle (Illustrator)

When the reader discovers that the house is on fire and the firehouse is over a mile away, the only source of help is a neighbor, an old lady that everyone thinks is a witch

Genres: Childrens, Choose Your Own Adventure

52 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1985

About the author

Raymond A. Montgomery (born 1936 in Connecticut) was an author and progenitor of the classic Choose Your Own Adventure interactive children's book series, which ran from 1979 to 2003. Montgomery graduated from Williams College and went to graduate school at Yale University and New York University (NYU). He devoted his life to teaching and education.

In 2004, he co-founded the Chooseco publishing company alongside his wife, fellow author/publisher Shannon Gilligan, with the goal of reviving the CYOA series with new novels and reissued editions of the classics.

He continued to write and publish until his death in 2014.

Reviews

[Josiah · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Dragonlark versions of Fire! and Lost Dog! are both reprints of books from the original Bantam Skylark Choose Your Own Adventure series, and share a similar feel. Both center on a realistic crisis you must address, scared as you are by it. In Fire!, you become aware of the threat when you wake up one morning to find dark smoke billowing up from under the kitchen door. The stove is engulfed in flames, and the rest of the house will soon be in danger. Your mother isn't home; she said she would be in town all morning. You were always told to immediately evacuate the house in case of fire, so you grab your tiger-striped cat, Nipper, and head out. Calling emergency services is a top priority, but the house phone is inaccessible. You live a distance from your closest neighbor—a recluse you've never seen—and a mile and a half from town. What should you do?

It's a long bike ride to town, but someone has to go for help. You could scrap the idea and fight the flames yourself with a garden hose, but you're not trained to handle such an emergency. Your best hope if you try to extinguish the burn yourself is that a passing car calls the firehouse. If you make it to town on your bike, alerting a firefighter won't be easy. You find the volunteer firehouse unattended, and every second lost means more damage to your home. Should you hunt for a fire alarm, or search downtown for someone who can help? The sooner you locate a firefighter, the better. You may end up the hero of this whole scary day.

Getting help from your reclusive neighbor instead of biking to town means visiting Mrs. Ryerson. Rumors claim she's a witch, but you can't let your home burn down because of rumors. Mustering your courage, you race across open fields to her shadowy mansion and cry out for help. When her creaky voice responds from the darkness inside, you can run away and find someone else to contact the firehouse, but walking toward the voice is the braver option. Perhaps Mrs. Ryerson is just a shy elderly woman who wishes neighbors would give her a chance, and helping you report the fire could be the start of a rewarding friendship for you both. Or...perhaps not. One way or the other, you're about to find out.

Mrs. Ryerson and Alice the bakery owner/fire chief are fun characters, though not atypical for Choose Your Own Adventure. The internal consistency of Fire! comes and goes, especially where Mrs. Ryerson is concerned, and the firefighters aren't always the brightest lot, but this is a decent story with more variety than one might expect. In some narrative branches you hardly deal with the fire at all; in fact, in the Dragonlark version the reader never sees any flames, just smoke, a notable divergence from Frank Bolle's original illustrations. Keith Newton's artwork for Fire! is good, but I slightly prefer Bolle's, and I like the Bantam Skylark edition better overall. I'll rate Fire! at least one and a half stars and would consider two, and I'm sure to reread it. This is a fun, quick book.

[Josiah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fire! comes three books prior to Lost Dog! in the Bantam Skylark Choose Your Own Adventure series, and the two R.A. Montgomery books share similarities. Both center on a realistic crisis you must address, scared as you are by it. In this case, you become aware of the threat when you wake up one morning to find dark smoke billowing up from under the kitchen door. The stove is engulfed in flames, and the rest of the house will soon be in danger. Your mother isn't home; she said she would be in town all morning. You were always told to immediately evacuate the house in case of fire, so you grab your tiger-striped cat, Nipper, and head out. Calling emergency services is a top priority, but the house phone is inaccessible. You live a distance from your closest neighbor—a recluse you've never seen—and a mile and a half from town. What should you do?

It's a long bike ride to town, but someone has to go for help. You could scrap the idea and fight the flames yourself with a garden hose, but you're not trained to handle such an emergency. Your best hope if you try to extinguish the burn yourself is that a passing car calls the firehouse. If you make it to town on your bike, alerting a firefighter won't be easy. You find the volunteer firehouse unattended, and every second lost means more damage to your home. Should you hunt for a fire alarm, or search downtown for someone who can help? The sooner you locate a firefighter, the better. You may end up the hero of this whole scary day.

Getting help from your reclusive neighbor instead of biking to town means visiting Mrs. Ryerson. Rumors claim she's a witch, but you can't let your home burn down because of rumors. Mustering your courage, you race across open fields to her shadowy mansion and cry out for help. When her creaky voice responds from the darkness inside, you can run away and find someone else to contact the firehouse, but walking toward the voice is the braver option. Perhaps Mrs. Ryerson is just a shy elderly woman who wishes neighbors would give her a chance, and helping you report the fire could be the start of a rewarding friendship for you both. Or...perhaps not. One way or the other, you're about to find out.

Mrs. Ryerson and Alice the bakery owner/fire chief are fun characters, though not atypical for Choose Your Own Adventure. On the movie theater marquee on page twenty-seven, "Star Wars III" is playing. Return of the Jedi, which would have been considered "Star Wars III" at the time, came out in 1983, just two years before this book. The internal consistency of Fire! comes and goes, especially where Mrs. Ryerson is concerned, and the firefighters aren't always the brightest lot, but this is a decent story with more variety than one might expect. In some narrative branches, you hardly deal with the fire at all. I'll rate Fire! at least one and a half stars and would consider two, and I'm sure to reread it. This is a fun, quick book.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this with my son. This book did end in satisfactory conclusions, so I thought that was nice change from some of the other Choose Your Own Adventure books!

[JKR · Rating 2 out of 5]

A mostly mundane offering from Mr. Montgomery, in somewhat the same vein as “Lost Dog!”