Secret of the Dolphins

Choose Your Own Adventure #134

by Edward Packard

Will You Discover the Legendary City of the Dolphins?

You are a summer intern at the renowned Dolphin Institute in Hawaii, hoping to help find the fabled underwater city of the dolphins and make scientific history. As you're nearing the spot where the treasure-filled city is believed tolie, your group is approached by some boaters. When they press you for details about what you're doing, your suspicions are aroused. How much should you reveal?

If you decide to tell them the truth, turn to page 30. If you make up another story, turn to page 70. Think carefully before you decide! If you trust the boaters, they might do as you ask and leave the area. Or they could double-cross you and claim the treasures of the dolphin city for themselves!

What happens next in the story? It all depends on the choices you make. How does the story end? Only you can find out! And best part is that you can keep reading and rereading until you've had not one but many incredibly daring experiences!

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

117 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

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

[Zacaro Caro · Rating 2 out of 5]

I still remember wanting more questions answered. Life has so many mysteries--I want my fiction books to have answers. Meh, then again I was always worried that I'd make the wrong decision when I read these books... Maybe I just didn't want the dolphins getting mad at me;)

[Nick Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

Once again, Edward Packard wrote a disappointing entry in the Choose Your Own Adventure series. Imagine my shock. The premise of Secret of the Dolphins is fairly interesting: You're an intern assigned to an oceanography lab that is trying to decipher the language of dolphins, but the dolphins seem to have something they're deliberately trying to hide from your research team. The problem is that the titular secret that the apparently super-intelligent dolphins are hiding is a spot where they like to play. That's all. The cover image where the POV character ("you") swims down into a sunken city alongside a friendly dolphin doesn't actually happen. In fact, nothing interesting happens. There's essentially no good ending along any of the paths, just a lot of "Wow, dolphins are amazing, so we should leave them alone," dead ends with none of the early promise of inter-species communication. That's compounded by the fact that this book is boring and has a very low eleven endings, which always means large chunks of text without any choices to break them up. This was immediately obvious, because the beginning of the book is ten full pages before you get to a choice, with that entire stretch consisting of your arrival at the lab and introductions. Later in the book you make a choice, then after twelve entire pages of the book going on autopilot you hit an ending. By this juncture somebody had obviously started missing the point of a series with the word "choose" in the title. Another annoying detail is the appearance of CYOA regular character Doctor Nera Vivaldi, who is somehow a scientist in every field and time period across dozens of the series' books. For some inexplicable reason, if you're looking for a astrologer in ancient Rome, a sawbones in the old west, a nuclear physicist during World War II, a marine biologist in the present day, an expert on inter-dimensional travel in the near future, or an engineer building the latest model of starship in the distant future, in these books it's going to be the apparently immortal genius polymath Dr. Vivaldi and I am sick to death of her.

[Colton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was exactly what I was expecting it to be: a fun, little ocean-exploring adventure. It's a really cute little book. There's not too many choices, and you'll be reading pages and pages between choices, but it's not too big a deal. There are a lot of good endings and the bad ones mostly involve drowning. It's about as much fun as a story about studying dolphins can be. Decidedly average, but pick it up anyway - especially if you like dolphins.

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

Lets see what happens here as you look for a treasure filled underwater city!

[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.