Item - How to Wake a Sleeping Beauty

I picked this up at a school fair in Australia.

I'd never heard of this series, so I was very surprised to discover it was like a CYOA after seeing "Read the book again and again and make a different story every time" on its cover and flicking through the pages.

There's three other titles in the series:
- Save the Three Pigs
- Story of Red Riding Hood
- The Three Bears

It's an interesting format. The game play section consists of 30 pages and is broken into six coloured sections: Yellow, Red, Blue, Purple (although it looks Pink to me), Green and Black. Each section contains pages numbered 1-5.

When presented with choices, the reader is given directions like "go to page green 1" or "go to page black 4". In addition, there are icon based choice indicators: coloured triangles (i.e. ◁ or ▷) indicating which section you must turn to and in which direction it is. Beside the icon is the page number (1-5). Not knowing which order the coloured sections were in, I found the directional indicators very useful.

The story was pretty basic and everything you'd expect from a sleeping beauty theme (i.e. princess, prince, evil witch). There are a few surprises along the way which make it interesting. The story basically loops around until you have all the items required (keys) to continue and each item (key) can be found in multiple locations so you can easily double up on them.

The book is targeted at "very young children" which is not exactly my demographic (i.e. male in his late 30s), so it's probably no surprise that I didn't find it that captivating. Perhaps I'll test it on my 5 year old and update my review.

Whilst not spectacular, I appreciate the simplicity of the coloured artwork (i.e. classic kids fairy-tale artwork from the 80s).

Whilst gamebooks.org notes "Number of Endings: 3 (2 bad, 1 good)", technically there's a fourth ending that results in a restart, this was the ending I reached on my first read-through.

* Spoiler Alert *
I turned the princess into a toad and had to start again, my bad. Lesson learnt: never trust the evil witch!

More reviews by waktool