easy reader

What If You -- Follow the Lone Cry
What If Books #2
By Laurie B. Clifford
Regal Books, 1983
97 pages

Another take on the Choose Your Own Adventure type
of books aimed at reluctant or low-interest readers, this time from a Christian
publisher.  

You are "Bubba", the middle-school son of globe- trotting parents whose
adventures take them deep into National Geographic country, this time in the
Yukon.  As with similar books, there is a basic two- to three-page premise and
then several forks in the road buy way of narrative choices that lead you flipping
pages toward one of the books 26 possible endings.

After a childhood of being dragged around the world his parents have finally
bought a house and stayed put for two years.  Bubba feels he's old enough to
stay behind while his parents go off on their next adventure but the conflict
tugging at him concerns is younger sister who sees Bubba as her emotional
anchor.  Through the various storylines Bubba is equally torn between making
the right choices and in choosing friends over family.

It's clear from the language used that the author of this book either has no
children and learned everything they know about pre-teen behavior from
watching television, or they are truly out-of-touch with their own children and
believe they are hipper than they really are.  That the ideal lead-in to a summer
hanging out with friends is described as "working our bods off all year so we can
pork out" at the local pizzeria should have turned off all but the most sheltered
of readers.

The Christian message is found mostly in the types of choices the reader gets to
make, and reinforces the idea that presumably good choices lead to happiness and
bad choices lead to death.  I kid you not.  Of the 26 endings here, 6 end in physical
pain or family misfortune, 6 are unsatisfying non-endings that leave you feeling like
you've wasted your time, and 12 lead to death for the Bubba including (with their
corresponding "message"):
Death by over-eating 3 pizzas and downing a pitcher of soda (gluttony)
Death by cobra in the cargo hold of a plane (disobedience)
Death by gold mine cave-in (greed)
Death by black widow spider bite (deception to alleviate guilt)
Death by plaster body cast (deception)
Death by drowning (arrogance, selfishness)
Death by falling off Mt. Everest (desire, covetousness)
Death by lying in the road to get run over (more deception), and my favorite
Death by having ones heart pierced with a lightning bolt by the spirit of
dream-killers and bleeding to death in bed at night. (guilt)
Ignoring the obvious messages about what a good, moral Christian would choose in
any situation, to say nothing of the bizarre endings, is a very subtle message
about what kind of a family this is and what sort of redemption is available to
Bubba.  It's hard to gloss over the very Oedipal flashback where Bubba helps
his mother deliver his younger sister in the jungles of the Philippines during a
monsoon, but it's easy to miss the message that parents like Bubba's are
doomed to misfortune 75% of the time in these adventures because they allow
their son the make (or have raised him to make) bad choices.  In fact, if they
remained a proper family rooted in one place, raising obedient children,
giving the youngest the emotional sustenance she requires so that she doesn't
rely on her brother to fill the void,  none of this would have happened.

It doesn't seem too miscalculated a jump to suggest that these books weren't
entirely aimed at the loyal Christian child but as missionary propaganda, adventure
tales meant to cull wayward sheep from their heathen (liberal?) flocks and lead
them to salvation.

Maybe that's all too much to read into a sub-par middle-school book series from
the 1980's that stalled out after four titles, found at a library sale for a quarter.  Oh,
and as for the title, the lone cry is another lonely outcast child, this one stuck in the
Yukon with her treasure-mad mountain of an uncle.  If you get far enough along
to find out who and what the lone cry is you'll wish you'd stayed behind and died a
painful death-by-root canal.

// posted by dlz @ 11:01 PM