Item - You Are a Genius

This book is one of my favorites in the series, and it shows how Edward Packard is the absolute master of writing this particular type of book. The plot is simple: You are a genius, having graduated high school, college, and graduate school with honors, and you're only fourteen years old! Then the book picks up speed as you decide just what it is that you want to do with your life and your incredible intelligence. Options include: going into business for yourself and making a fortune, going into spaceship design, developing a new formula for a substance hundreds of times stronger than steel in order to construct a submarine, and designing a power plant that will provide the whole world with a new kind of clean and renewable energy source. At one part in the book, you even get to assist the President in thwarting terrorists!

I have to say: I liked this book. And the kid that you, the reader, portray, looks a little bit like I did when I was fourteen, but with shorter hair. Also, the illustrations by Frank Bolle are quite detailed, and pretty cool as well.

And the best part about being a genius, at the least one that you play in this book, is that you still have friends, and you are a good decent person with everything you attempt. Meaning of course, that you do not become pompous and arrogant and totally convinced of your own superiority over others. I really dislike people who are like that.

So, in closing, read this book, and I hope you enjoy it like I did!

More reviews by drereichdude

With a title as unimaginative as You Are a Genius, I did not come in with high expectations. However, the book proved to be better than I thought. The basic premise is that your character was born with "neural tangles" that, during your teenage years, cause your brain to restructure itself such that you become endowed with extraordinary intelligence. From there it’s a matter of putting your brain to good use.

The two main branching narratives have you going into either space exploration or developing sophisticated artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley. Then off of these two main branches are a few tertiary branches which have you going into things such as developing clean energy, deep sea exploration, sailing across the Pacific, and helping the U.S. Government defeat a terrorist organization.

I found the space exploration branch to be the better of the major two. Once you and your team of astronauts reaches Omricon, a distant planet capable of supporting human life, you run into aliens that are, in their appearance, eerily similar to those from Ridley Scott’s popular movie franchise—just see Frank Bolle’s illustrations on pages 27, 57, and 91 and his source of inspiration should become immediately evident. After coming into contact with the Omricon aliens, you are presented with three choices, all of which lead to swift endings. One of these endings was, at least to me, particularly childish and annoying; you are able to speak the aliens' language and as an appreciative gesture they then present you and your team with baskets full of human-edible food (e.g., fish and bread). I would have loved to see a well-developed story in this arc whereby you engage in tooth-and-nail battle with the aliens before escaping the planet by the skin of your teeth.

I found the tertiary branches to be little more than filler material and resultantly a drag on the book. There were just too many of these detours and too little space in the book to craft them in a way so as to render them at least halfway compelling. However, there is one page (pg. 97) out of these gratuitous branches that was delightful. It’s a scene, remarkably reminiscent of 1980’s action films, wherein to escape terrorists you jump off the fourth floor hotel balcony into the swimming pool below and stick your head out to witness a shootout between the Sydney Police Department and the terrorists. How about some more of this sort of goodness!

Also, the deep sea exploration branch (you get there through your invention of Superplast—just read the book and you’ll see what it is) was another very serious lost opportunity. Why were only a few pages dedicated to a storyline that held so much promise and possibility? To wit, while exploring ocean depths never-before travelled, you come across a highly technologically-sophisticated species of aliens who have the ability to telepathically communicate with you. The story then abruptly ends. These are the sort of structural problems in many gamebooks that irk me. I wish Edward Packard had done away with the gratuitous storylines and instead focused his efforts on fully-developing just two or three of the excursions.

While I can’t help but wish the book was more tightly crafted, this was nonetheless a fun ride. Edward Packard’s writing vocabulary and sentence structure sit very well with me. Frank Bolle, as usual, drew beautiful illustrations for the book and is unmistakably a reason why I rated the book a little higher than I otherwise would have.

Rating: 7.0/10.0

More reviews by tonylachief