Item - The Ultimate Wave

This is quite an interesting book. It's got a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sense of weirdness, complete with lots of improbable events and random tangents, and the format is a fun blend of text and comic book segments. At several points, the comic book panels branch off in multiple directions, showing different possibilities, either hitting bad endings or eventually rejoining. Because all of the paths run more or less in parallel, there isn't really decision-making to do, but there's still a certain gamebook flavor on hand. Of course, the key thing here is the wackiness. I enjoyed the read, laughing out loud on a few occasions, but I also found some of the humor a bit on the heavy-handed and predictable side. Of course, I'm older than the target audience of the book, and my tastes are probably similar enough to the author's that I've read a lot of the same things that influenced the creation of this work. If I were younger and less experienced, I'm sure this would have become a favorite pretty quickly. If, like me, you're a veteran of random, wacky, self-referential humor, this is still good for a few chuckles, and it's a quick read; if you know a kid who doesn't like to read but has the right kind of taste, this is the ultimate gift. If you're only interested in interactivity, you can safely skip this... but it will be interesting to see if later volumes make more of the gamebook side of things.

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