Roller Star

Choose Your Own Adventure #136

by Edward Packard, Ron Wing (Illustrator)

Choose Your Own Adventure books allow the reader to direct the story by choosing the direction of the plot. You have just discovered the challenging new sport of inline skating. You want to be the best. Have you got the speed, strength, and wits to be a roller star?

Genres: Choose Your Own Adventure, Gamebooks, Fiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published May 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

[useFOSS · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got this book as a school prize. Introduced me to the gamebook genre.

[Nick Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

You do not get to become a roller star in Roller Star. This is one of the most befuddling traits of certain CYOA books, because one would assume that out of the multiple endings there would always be at least one that satisfies the title. The closest you come to becoming a roller star in Roller Star is reaching second or third place in a test match at a private rollerblading camp, then being handed the victory after the fact. Then that might allow you to go on to tackle an actual competition at some point in the future, though the book merely implies that as a possibility. The best ending in the book is actually one where you quit rollerblading entirely and work part time at a sporting goods store, which eventually nets you two million dollars in stock options. The only way to win is not to play, I guess?

This entry in the series also contains a lot of weird moralizing, including somebody laying out the prisoner's dilemma thought experiment (without calling it that) that earns characters who behave selfishly in the resulting choices bad endings or scoldings. There's also the most painfully obvious rigged choice I've ever seen, where a friend wipes out in a race and you can either stop to help your concussed, helpless, injured pal or keep on going for the win under the assumption that somebody else will probably eventually come along to yank the branch he impaled himself on out of his ribcage. Chrissakes, these are the books for older kids, not the two year olds who might not know that helping a half-dead buddy is a good idea.

I will give the book this: As with some of the other sports entries, this is one of the rare CYOA books where you don't die in any of the endings. You don't even suffer any serious injuries, which might be the only instance of that happening as the sports entries usually end up with at least one ending where a broken arm derails your career. Not that you have a career to derail in Roller Rookie, but it's still something.

[Elle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Somehow risky choices lead to hanging out with the cool kids in a video arcade?!? (one of the other kids was injured but not result of one of my choices)

[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.