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Item - Madame Guillotine: The French Revolution

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(British cover)
(American cover)
Series: Real Life Gamebooks — no. 1
Alternate Title: The Bloody Rebellion (American edition)
Translated Into: Madama Ghigliottina (Italian)
Madame Giljotin (Swedish)
Madame Guillotine : den franske revolution (Danish)
L'Ombre de la guillotine (French)
Authors: Farrell, Simon
Sutherland, Jon(athan)
Illustrators: Wood, Cathy (British cover)
Dodge, Bill (American cover)
Williams, Brian (interior)
Dates: 1986 (British edition)
1988 (American edition)
Length: 300 sections
Number of Endings: 32
Kveto's Thoughts:

The first book of the series focuses upon an interesting turning point in history, the bloody French Revolution. In this book, you play a minor French aristocrat who is a soldier in Paris and must choose whether he will support the uprising or oppose it.

The book suffers from the same flaws of the other books: short passages, lots of random pointless page flipping and very little characterization. It does manage to be a bit more balanced than book 2 in terms of which side to choose, but there is still a bias toward the aristocratic side, pointing out often "Is it your fault you were born an aristocrat?" (Which, to be fair, considering your character's background, is probably how you'd feel). The book often shows the brutality of the revolt but never really shows why the peasantry had such grievances, but that might be due to lack of space and not getting too bogged down in political history.

The adventure itself can be fun, with a good chance of you getting your head chopped off or shot. Overall, I enjoyed it a bit more than the other books in the series which I have read.

A bit more entertaining than books 2 and 4 but still not as good as it could have been.

More reviews by Kveto

Special Thanks:Thanks to Ed Jolley for the British cover scan.
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