You Are a Shark

Choose Your Own Adventure #45

by Edward Packard

When readers stumble upon a forbidden temple while hiking in the remote mountains of Nepal, they become the victims of an ancient curse--to be transformed into animals

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

114 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published May 1, 1985

About the author

Edward Packard attended and graduated from both Princeton University and Columbia Law School. He was one of the first authors to explore the idea of gamebooks, in which the reader is inserted as the main character and makes choices about the direction the story will go at designated places in the text.

The first such book that Edward Packard wrote in the Choose Your Own Adventure series was titled "Sugarcane Island", but it was not actually published as the first entry in the Choose Your Own Adventure Series. In 1979, the first book to be released in the series was "The Cave of Time", a fantasy time-travel story that remained in print for many years. Eventually, one hundred eighty-four Choose Your Own Adventure books would be published before production on new entries to the series ceased in 1998. Edward Packard was the author of many of these books, though a substantial number of other authors were included as well.

In 2005, Choose Your Own Adventure books once again began to be published, but none of Edward Packard's titles have yet been included among the newly-released books.

Reviews

[Petercsm730 · Rating 3 out of 5]

You Are a Shark (CYOA #45) by Edward Packard has only three pages where you actually are a shark. The plot has you, a young kid exploring the Himalayas like kids are wont to do, trespassing in a sacred temple. As punishment you must shed your human form becoming many animals until you find a little enlightenment. If you don't want to be spoiled skip this sentence as I'm going to list all the creatures you can be depending on your choices: a shark for 3 pages, an elephant, a horse amidst a thunderstorm, a husky dog, a sperm whale, a tree (which is as exciting as it sounds), a wombat, a mosquito, a misbehaving housecat, a zebra, a gorilla, a fox, an eagle, a rabbit, a seagull, a sea lion, and for very briefly a pig. You can also be a bear but it's pretty disappointing as it either ends with you becoming an octopus or with a non-ending ending.

The art by Ron Wing is pretty good. It has a lot of detail and portrays the writing quite well. I did laugh at the WARNING page where it tells you not to read a CYOA book straight through because on the opposite page is a drawing of an old man with his mouth agape looking terrified. This book's fun and I liked how occasionally you see the perspective of the hunter and the prey in the same situation. The book loops back into itself a lot for a longer read given its short length. Sometimes the redundancy of being the hunter or the hunted got a little dull and the timing of day and night from page to page is inconsistent, but otherwise I enjoyed myself. There are a few anti-poacher and hunting-for-sport moments but not near as many as I thought there might be for a book about being different animals.

This was a fine choice to read in Starbucks while drinking my ice (iced?) coffee.

[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.

[Marshal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book about is human life became an animal i t also talk about shark is try to eat the human i would recommend this book people who like adventure like climbing the mountains and getting out risk situations. This book is by Edward Packard. I also like this book because it has lots of cool adventure in it.

[Astir · Rating 1 out of 5]

omg u only get 2 b shark for 3 pgs wtf

[Nick Jones · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you think that you are a shark in You Are a Shark, I have some bad news. This is not a book all or even mostly about being a shark, this is a book about being a human, a zebra, a whale, a gorilla, a house cat, an eagle, a fox, an elephant, a bear, a pig, a dog, a horse, an albatross, a sea lion, an octopus, a wombat, a lion, a mosquito, a tree, a crab, and on just three pages, a shark. Maybe it was assumed that You Are a Menagerie of Animals wasn't as marketable a title as You Are a Shark, but that's blatant false advertising and a thumb to the eye of any actual shark aficionados who might've picked this book up.

If you actually transformed between those animals as part of some larger coherent story it would be acceptable (as I recall, there was a series of books called Animorphs where teenagers turned into animals to fight aliens, which had to have been better just by default), except this is a horrible mess of disconnected gibberish. The pattern of the book is that you're dumped in medias res to an already existing animal - Quantum Leap-style - without any memory of the fact that you're human, then you do animal stuff for a couple of pages. After doing animal stuff you either get killed or are shunted off to be a different animal. There's no actual through-line to the plot and the book possesses an aggravating, non-linear form where you jump between different story paths to frequently repeat things you've already done. You Are Random-Ass Boring Animals A Shark is also peculiar in actively punishing the reader for making smart choices, the most glaring of which is that you're given an option to either try to kill and eat a random human or not, where trying to avoid murder and technical cannibalism results in your getting eaten by a killer whale.

Edward Packard, what are you doing?

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED IT! My brother gave me 2 boxes of books he was getting rid of and these were in it. So fun! Smiled the whole time reading it. The topic is a hiker in Nepal who becomes different animals. So thought provoking and fun.

[Mark L · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's great but you are not a shark. Well, you might be for a couple of pages depending on your choices. You could actually do the story without being a shark. Apart from that it was great. If you were a shark in the book this would have been 5 stars.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was never a shark.

[for-much-deliberation ... · Rating 4 out of 5]

... choose your own adventure #45 by Edward Packard - 'You are a shark' ...

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

a cute adventure where you get to be several different animals.

[Sheila Read · Rating 5 out of 5]

the adventures that I went through when I was bored I just read these books over and over again you would never get to the end of the story.