Kim Bakker Bakker থেকে Ambasala, Odisha 754119, India
jared read this to me while i was sick with the flu, & it was perfect for being in a feverish delirium. he even showed me the hilariously ugly illustrations when appropriate. the set-up is that "you," the reader, are an adventurer who has been drafted by an english baron to travel to china & track down this other adventuer/archaeologist dude the baron had sent to china the year before in pursuit of the save of 1000 buddhas & fantastic ancient treasures. "you" have to make all these choices about what route you will take to china (the year is 1901) & how to handle conflicts that arise in pursuit of pinckney, the adventurer you are pursuing, &/or the cave in question. because choose-your-own-adventure readers are not of any particular gender, & because the good folks at bantam didn't want to assume that adventurers traveling to china would necessarily be dudes, the illustrations of "you" throughout the book are not gender-specific, but surely there is a way to illustrate a character of indeterminate gender without making them pudgy, short, horrifyingly ugly, with an awful mid-length curly haircut. in other words, i see what they were going for & it really did not work out. as a child, when i read these books, i always took the most individualistic, independent path available, & inevitably, i wound up pushed out of a space craft without a helmet or eaten by an alligator or something. same with this book. if you accept people's help & assume people have good intentions, you find pinckney &/or the cave &/or something equally as good & are richly rewarded. if you try to strike out on your own or treat others with undue suspicion, you end up trapped inside the great wall to perish, or sucked into quicksand, or with a broken neck. it's pretty intense. lots of, "you wander further into the desert, never to escape." as an adult, i was more inclined to accept help anyway, because it seemed more sensible, so i found pinckney & the cave on the first try & jared thought i had cheated somehow. this book could have gone to pretty bad places, with ample opportunity for broadly drawn chinese stereotypes, but it wasn't too bad. it acknowledged the boxer rebellion & every storyline contained some implicit or explicit critique of the baron's imperialistic thirst for ancient treasures to which he has no right. one of the best outcomes involves finding pinckney & the cave, collecting the baron's prize in exchange for finding pinckney but keeping the cave a secret, & splitting the prize money with this chinese monk who is working to have chinese academics study the cave. decent reading for when you are sick.