The Green Slime

Choose Your Own Adventure: Young Readers #6

by Susan Saunders, Paul Granger (Illustrator)

The reader is given choices to make in order to fight the green slime made from a chemistry set.

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

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

Reviews

[Josiah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Fantastical premises were the foundation for a few of Susan Saunders's Bantam Skylark Choose Your Own Adventures, and before The Creature from Miller's Pond, Attack of the Monster Plants, or You Are Invisible, she gave us The Green Slime. You're excited to try out the chemistry set your aunt Beth gave you as a birthday gift, but for the moment you have to babysit your four-and-a-half-year-old cousin Stevie. He's a whirling dervish, wrecking things all over your bedroom, but finally seems to have slowed down and be napping on your bed. When you and your friend Jan are conversing downstairs and hear him giggling, you feel uneasy. Should you run and check on him?

Stevie, it turns out, has been meddling with your chemistry set. If you go upstairs right away, there's noxious green slime bubbling in a dish he holds. You can direct Jan to pour it down the sink, but soon a river of the green stuff is overflowing the bathroom and across your bedroom floor. Its tendrils reach up to nab Stevie on the bed. The window might be your only escape, but can you retrieve your cousin too? You could try a daring experiment and feed rubber to the slime, which it seems to enjoy, but what if it exits the house searching for more? Whatever you do, don't let Stevie eat the slime in an impulsive act of rebellion against you; having a kid who's green from head to toe will do nothing to keep you out of trouble.

Maybe when you first hear Stevie giggling, you see no need to rush upstairs. In that case, the green ooze flows down to you. The stairs are inaccessible, but should you climb the oak tree outside your bedroom window to evacuate Stevie? Grabbing a ladder from the garage might lead to a tricky stilt walk to the bedroom, but you'll have a chance to save your cousin. You might be better off seeking outside help from the get-go; a trip to the grocery store could net you enough bags of ice to freeze the slime solid, or you can visit Professor Tate, a scientist studying microorganisms that consume organic material. Could they swallow the slime? Lugging the bucket of microorganisms up the tree to your bedroom window risks spilling too much for it to be effective, but success might bring a problem just as bizarre as the slime. Will life ever return to normal?

I'm not impressed by The Green Slime; I'll rate it one and a half stars. It's hard to buy the notion that a kid alone for a few moments with a toy chemistry set could create such a threat, and the implausibilities multiply from there. I do appreciate direct mention of the Incredible Hulk on page thirty-nine; I wouldn't have expected a branded superhero reference. The Green Slime's offbeat style is its strength, but the story has nothing to teach and isn't far outside the familiar for Choose Your Own Adventure. Compared to The Creature from Miller's Pond and You Are Invisible, this isn't one of Susan Saunders's best.

[Bobby]

The roads not taken while reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book have always been motes to trouble my mind's eye.

But any book with a title reminiscent of the 60's cult film "The Green Slime" can't be all bad.

[BobbieJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Books like this are magical. They help a child to foster a love of reading, to stretch their imagination, to see the world from another perspective and get caught up in the fantastical. They show kids it's okay to think outside the box, and how important dreamers are to the world. I think there need to be more books to nurture that sense of wonder and endless possibilities. The Green Slime is fun and innocent and imaginative, and from a simpler and more innocent time (the 80s!)

I love this book! I have been looking for it for years! Literally years! When I was a little kid this was one of my favorite books. My mom would read to me at night before bed, and I'd ask her over and over again to read me this book. I'd make all the choices and she'd read the through the results all the way to the end and then, depending on how long or short a time it took, we might get to read it again and make different choices.

When I was in high school we moved a couple of times and every time we did I donated or gave away some toys and books and things. And at some point the book was either lost or given away. It was probably more than twenty years before I even thought of this book again, and of course when I did, I couldn't remember it's name!

So for the last ten to fifteen years I've been trying to find this book without the name, the author, or any other information other than it had something to do with green slime! Let me tell you, STRANGE things come up when you type Children's Book + Green Slime into Google!

But today I realized that there was one other piece of information about the book that I do remember but had not previously used in my search. It's a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) book. So when I typed in Children's Book + Green Slime + Choices there it was!

So far I've only found it in hardcover and paperback, unfortunately it's not available in ebook format. But I'm hoping that I will be able to find a way to request the publisher to release a digital version.

You might think that this is a lot of trouble to go through to find a forty-ish year old book (and maybe it is!), but books like this are the reason I became a writer. I fell in love with stories and reading and words and language in general. I can only hope that some day someone will say that about one of my books.

I would also love to read it to my own child some day. So I'd absolutely recommend The Green Slime to anyone with small children, especially those who read to their kids. It's an awesome way to spend time with your little ones while expanding and encouraging their dreams.

[Kerianne Kerr · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admit I rated it so highly durable to nostalgia, but it must have been fantastic as I had read it 3 years in a row in grade 2, 3, and 4. It was my first Choose Your Own Adventure style of book and I must have thought of it recently because I was thinking how I would like to write a CYOA one day

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.5

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite "choose your own adventure" books. I read it all the time and never got tired of it. Eventhough I had choosen every adventure a hundred times!

[April · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a major contributor to my love of reading!

[Gail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well this one freaked my kid out. I think it was the Illustrations. Eeeeek!

[Katy Lovejoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always found chose yoir own adventures simultaneously amusing and frustrating