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Buffyverse Novels #11
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Keep Me in Mind
Hgh school student Buffy Summers and her companions battle the forces of evil, in an interactive adventure featuring a variety of possible endings in which readers take on the role of the Slayer and determine the course of the action. Original. (A syndicated TV series, now seen on FX, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar) (Horror)
256 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published April 26, 2005
2 people are currently reading
558 people want to read
About the author
Nancy Holder
353 books2,407 followersNancy Holder, New York Times Bestselling author of the WICKED Series, has just published CRUSADE - the first book in a new vampire series cowritten with Debbie Viguie. The last book her her Possession series is set to release in March 2011.
Nancy was born in Los Altos, California, and her family settled for a time in Walnut Creek. Her father, who taught at Stanford, joined the navy and the family traveled throughout California and lived in Japan for three years. When she was sixteen, she dropped out of high school to become a ballet dancer in Cologne, Germany, and later relocated to Frankfurt Am Main.
Eventually she returned to California and graduated summa cum laude from the University of California at San Diego with a degree in Communications. Soon after, she began to write; her first sale was a young adult romance novel titled Teach Me to Love.
Nancy’s work has appeared on the New York Times, USA Today, LA Times, amazon.com, LOCUS, and other bestseller lists. A four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association, she has also received accolades from the American Library Association, the American Reading Association, the New York Public Library, and Romantic Times.
She and Debbie Viguié co-authored the New York Times bestselling series Wicked for Simon and Schuster. They have continued their collaboration with the Crusade series, also for Simon and Schuster, and the Wolf Springs Chronicles for Delacorte (2011.) She is also the author of the young adult horror series Possessions for Razorbill. She has sold many novels and book projects set in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Saving Grace, Hellboy, and Smallville universes.
She has sold approximately two hundred short stories and essays on writing and popular culture. Her anthology, Outsiders, co-edited with Nancy Kilpatrick, was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award in 2005.
She teaches in the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing Program, offered through the University of Southern Maine. She has previously taught at UCSD and has served on the Clarion Board of Directors.
She lives in San Diego, California, with her daughter Belle, their two Corgis, Panda and Tater; and their cats, David and Kittnen Snow. She and Belle are active in Girl Scouts and dog obedience training.
Nancy was born in Los Altos, California, and her family settled for a time in Walnut Creek. Her father, who taught at Stanford, joined the navy and the family traveled throughout California and lived in Japan for three years. When she was sixteen, she dropped out of high school to become a ballet dancer in Cologne, Germany, and later relocated to Frankfurt Am Main.
Eventually she returned to California and graduated summa cum laude from the University of California at San Diego with a degree in Communications. Soon after, she began to write; her first sale was a young adult romance novel titled Teach Me to Love.
Nancy’s work has appeared on the New York Times, USA Today, LA Times, amazon.com, LOCUS, and other bestseller lists. A four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association, she has also received accolades from the American Library Association, the American Reading Association, the New York Public Library, and Romantic Times.
She and Debbie Viguié co-authored the New York Times bestselling series Wicked for Simon and Schuster. They have continued their collaboration with the Crusade series, also for Simon and Schuster, and the Wolf Springs Chronicles for Delacorte (2011.) She is also the author of the young adult horror series Possessions for Razorbill. She has sold many novels and book projects set in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Saving Grace, Hellboy, and Smallville universes.
She has sold approximately two hundred short stories and essays on writing and popular culture. Her anthology, Outsiders, co-edited with Nancy Kilpatrick, was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award in 2005.
She teaches in the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing Program, offered through the University of Southern Maine. She has previously taught at UCSD and has served on the Clarion Board of Directors.
She lives in San Diego, California, with her daughter Belle, their two Corgis, Panda and Tater; and their cats, David and Kittnen Snow. She and Belle are active in Girl Scouts and dog obedience training.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 23, 2015
Buffy choose your own adventure? Yes, please! Packed with sly references to past and (based on the Season 2 setting) future events of the Buffyverse. Do you train, or do you sneak off to paint your nails?
The only disappointment is the continual references to stiletto heals -- Buffy nearly always wore a sensible chunky heal.
The only disappointment is the continual references to stiletto heals -- Buffy nearly always wore a sensible chunky heal.
February 17, 2017
What makes a good Choose Your Own Adventure Buffy book? Well, the things that make a good Buffy book are characters that act true to the tv series, and a story that feel like it has something at risk for the reader and does not contradict what we know on the show. A good choose your own adventure book allows the reader to feel like they are in control of the story and their decisions have consequences. Unfortunately, this book (while clearly written by an author knowledgeable of the show) struggles under both measures.
The biggest problem in this book starts in the pages before chapter one. Typically a choose your own adventure book has a warning in it, “Stop! Don’t read the pages in this book in order!” or some similar remark. This book opts for a multipage letter from Giles to Buffy telling her about how this book allows her to relive her adventures or some other disclaimer, essentially telling the reader “none of what you are about to read is real.” Obviously none of it is real, we’re all aware of that. The problem is the nature of this specific story is that Buffy continually sees images from her past that aren’t real, and combined with the preface to the book, the entire thing reads like a long dream sequence (I hate dream sequences).
The story does not make much sense until you figure out what’s causing it, nor does it attempt to catch your attention beyond “Buffy goes to school, bad guys show up.” It is set in motion by questions about whether you should train or not or investigate the reappearance of an invisible girl (ok, that was poorly worded) but eventually we find out that **spoiler alert** Ethan Rayne is behind a spell that causes people’s memories to create doppelgangers of the people in the memories. For Buffy, this means repeat encounters with the Master, Luke, Spike, Ted, Incan Mummy Girl, and other memorable one episode villains from the show. Clearly the author is a fan of the show, and knows the characters well. Still, one of the first choices in both this and “The Suicide King” (the first two installments in this series) ask the reader to have Buffy make a decision to ditch her responsibilities and hang out with Cordelia. Both stories clearly take place in season two of the show, when it’s a guarantee neither character would ever make that choice, and start the books off with an action that feels like it contradicts the world the book is set in.
Whereas with the Suicide King, I finished the book quickly, taking three separate paths through it, with this book I only made one wrong turn early on (deciding to visit the nurse’s office, which led to the book ending with Buffy having to meet Principal Snyder for an hour every morning… definitely not the usual fatal error found in these books) before going back and making it to the happy ending on try two in what felt like more of a slog. Many of the “choices” were actually just roadmaps, where the reader would go to one page if they had made a certain choice earlier, or a different page if they made the other choice. The problem is that most of these pages I would end up having to read twice because I would take the choice that was earlier in the page count, and then have to revisit as I made it later on the book. (It’s a pet peeve of mine when you read these books when it is basically completed by reading chronologically, i.e. if you jump ahead 70 pages you’d be dead quicker than making the choice that you read the next page). Some of the choices take you to the same exact place as well, with only one page of interim text being different. There was also a fair share of crapshoot choices, “you lost her, do you go left or right?” or “they disappeared, do you check the roof or the alley?” It diminished the feeling of accomplishment of reaching the happy ending when there were few choices that required thought along the way. The net effect was reading the entire book felt more like reading a substandard Buffy book than a Choose Your Own Adventure Buffy book.
The best quality about the book is it was written with hindsight of a few seasons of television before it was published, so there are plenty of comments by Buffy that give a chuckle to the reader (seeing Jonathan and saying there’s no reason he’d ever draw the slayer’s interest, the thought of kissing Spike repulsing her, Willow never changing from her ordinary self, etc.). I also appreciate that when giving the opportunity to make decisions that the characters would make, it would lead to better consequences in the adventure. However, the earlier problems in the book, and the fact that the end of the book was about 20 pages in a row with no choices (and ridiculous markings at the bottom telling the reader to turn to the next page) didn’t lead to this being a great entry in the extended universe of Buffy.
The biggest problem in this book starts in the pages before chapter one. Typically a choose your own adventure book has a warning in it, “Stop! Don’t read the pages in this book in order!” or some similar remark. This book opts for a multipage letter from Giles to Buffy telling her about how this book allows her to relive her adventures or some other disclaimer, essentially telling the reader “none of what you are about to read is real.” Obviously none of it is real, we’re all aware of that. The problem is the nature of this specific story is that Buffy continually sees images from her past that aren’t real, and combined with the preface to the book, the entire thing reads like a long dream sequence (I hate dream sequences).
The story does not make much sense until you figure out what’s causing it, nor does it attempt to catch your attention beyond “Buffy goes to school, bad guys show up.” It is set in motion by questions about whether you should train or not or investigate the reappearance of an invisible girl (ok, that was poorly worded) but eventually we find out that **spoiler alert** Ethan Rayne is behind a spell that causes people’s memories to create doppelgangers of the people in the memories. For Buffy, this means repeat encounters with the Master, Luke, Spike, Ted, Incan Mummy Girl, and other memorable one episode villains from the show. Clearly the author is a fan of the show, and knows the characters well. Still, one of the first choices in both this and “The Suicide King” (the first two installments in this series) ask the reader to have Buffy make a decision to ditch her responsibilities and hang out with Cordelia. Both stories clearly take place in season two of the show, when it’s a guarantee neither character would ever make that choice, and start the books off with an action that feels like it contradicts the world the book is set in.
Whereas with the Suicide King, I finished the book quickly, taking three separate paths through it, with this book I only made one wrong turn early on (deciding to visit the nurse’s office, which led to the book ending with Buffy having to meet Principal Snyder for an hour every morning… definitely not the usual fatal error found in these books) before going back and making it to the happy ending on try two in what felt like more of a slog. Many of the “choices” were actually just roadmaps, where the reader would go to one page if they had made a certain choice earlier, or a different page if they made the other choice. The problem is that most of these pages I would end up having to read twice because I would take the choice that was earlier in the page count, and then have to revisit as I made it later on the book. (It’s a pet peeve of mine when you read these books when it is basically completed by reading chronologically, i.e. if you jump ahead 70 pages you’d be dead quicker than making the choice that you read the next page). Some of the choices take you to the same exact place as well, with only one page of interim text being different. There was also a fair share of crapshoot choices, “you lost her, do you go left or right?” or “they disappeared, do you check the roof or the alley?” It diminished the feeling of accomplishment of reaching the happy ending when there were few choices that required thought along the way. The net effect was reading the entire book felt more like reading a substandard Buffy book than a Choose Your Own Adventure Buffy book.
The best quality about the book is it was written with hindsight of a few seasons of television before it was published, so there are plenty of comments by Buffy that give a chuckle to the reader (seeing Jonathan and saying there’s no reason he’d ever draw the slayer’s interest, the thought of kissing Spike repulsing her, Willow never changing from her ordinary self, etc.). I also appreciate that when giving the opportunity to make decisions that the characters would make, it would lead to better consequences in the adventure. However, the earlier problems in the book, and the fact that the end of the book was about 20 pages in a row with no choices (and ridiculous markings at the bottom telling the reader to turn to the next page) didn’t lead to this being a great entry in the extended universe of Buffy.
April 29, 2020
This is the first book in the Stake Your Own Destiny series of novels within the wider Buffy universe. While I remember reading a few of the Choose Your Own Adventure Goosebumps books when I was in grade school, I don't remember liking them very much. Before I started reading this book a few hours ago, I had worried that I wouldn't care for it very much either due to my distaste with having to keep track of where I had been in a story and backtracking. When you're a completionist about books (with reading bibliographies and dedications and appendixes and such), having to remember what page the important choice you made was on and then having to get back to it after a half hour of reading one plot track can be tricky. Thankfully, I am a lot older now than when I tried to read the CYOE Goosebumps books and easily developed a book mark system for landmark choices. The smaller choices usually ended you up at the same outcome with just strange detours on the way. I just used my fingers as placeholders at those points and read what both decisions would do. With this system I was able to read every possible outcome of the adventure.
There is, naturally, a main adventure here that Holder obviously hopes you get to and you can tell it's the correct one because when you arrive there, it stops asking for you to make choices. Instead, you get about 15 pages of straight narrative for the final battle. The actual plot of the adventure is pretty straight forward once you get around to it, though it takes 3/4 of the story before you get to that point. The whole thing feels a bit chaotic until then, but given that (as the blurb on the book tells you) Ethan Rayne is behind everything, chaos is the entire plot.
It's a fun romp, and if you're unsure if a choose your own adventure style story is something that will work for you in the Buffy universe, I think this adventure is a good place to start. Even the choices that don't lead you to the main adventure are pretty interesting and outright funny at parts.
The only thing that kept me from giving this story a full 5 stars is that the dialogue feels kind of "bad fanfic"-esque. Cordelia's dialogue feels like generic Mean Girls script, and Buffy's inner thoughts don't sound like a person's inner monologue. It felt kind of faked, and while that worked into the plot in some parts, in others it just felt like Holder was reaching for Buffy's given character voice and not quite finding it.
There is, naturally, a main adventure here that Holder obviously hopes you get to and you can tell it's the correct one because when you arrive there, it stops asking for you to make choices. Instead, you get about 15 pages of straight narrative for the final battle. The actual plot of the adventure is pretty straight forward once you get around to it, though it takes 3/4 of the story before you get to that point. The whole thing feels a bit chaotic until then, but given that (as the blurb on the book tells you) Ethan Rayne is behind everything, chaos is the entire plot.
It's a fun romp, and if you're unsure if a choose your own adventure style story is something that will work for you in the Buffy universe, I think this adventure is a good place to start. Even the choices that don't lead you to the main adventure are pretty interesting and outright funny at parts.
The only thing that kept me from giving this story a full 5 stars is that the dialogue feels kind of "bad fanfic"-esque. Cordelia's dialogue feels like generic Mean Girls script, and Buffy's inner thoughts don't sound like a person's inner monologue. It felt kind of faked, and while that worked into the plot in some parts, in others it just felt like Holder was reaching for Buffy's given character voice and not quite finding it.
July 22, 2024
This book was just awful. A chose your own adventure style Buffy novel that is just plain boring. Normally Holder is right up there with Christopher Golden in terms of Buffy books, but this...this just lacked all heart and passion of the show.
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August 27, 2023time to log all the buffy books
January 1, 2009
This was the first one of those books I've read that lets you make the decisions and turn to the corresponding page. It was kind of random, but I think I will like the next one better. It's just hard to get used to jumping around.
I liked the whole, past monsters rise again thing, though.
I liked the whole, past monsters rise again thing, though.
February 25, 2019
CYOA, always a good time
February 27, 2014
I did like this book I was so moved when i was looking for a happy end and I got it and I imaged I was the slayer
April 21, 2014
it's a very weird book.
you get choices and what you choose makes the story.
you could be done in under 20 pages, or read most of the book.
you get choices and what you choose makes the story.
you could be done in under 20 pages, or read most of the book.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews