You Are a Genius

Choose Your Own Adventure #95

by Edward Packard

The reader has just finished graduate school at the age of 14 and must decide what to do with a genius-level IQ. Will the reader go into business and make a fortune or work for the government designing spaceships?

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

128 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1989

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

[Marianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

You wake one day with increasing brilliance. But you still have to have luck and guesswork. This story ranges on some very broad subjects from robots to space to submarines to electricity. Silly, but solid.

[Josiah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was very good. I always wondered at the idea of one day suddenly becoming a genius, having seen no previous indicators that this was the case for yourself (at least, I have wondered this since I read the book).
The choices in the book are mostly based on simple logic that would not necessarily see benefit from a genius mind; they are based more on common sense. Thus, if the reader makes a bad choice, it is reasonable to think that even your genius self in the story might have acted similarly.
I really enjoy the concept of this story, as well as Edward Packard's fleshing out of that concept in the writing. I would give this two and a half stars, most likely. It is a very exciting read.

[Wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most entertaining book I've ever read. I got it in 1990, I believe, and I still read it every few months.

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

Another 'Choose your own adventure', in this one you realise that being a genius is'nt all so easy

[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.