The Lost Jewels of Nabooti (Choose Your Own Adventure, #10) by R.A. Montgomery

The Lost Jewels of Nabooti (Choose Your Own Adventure, #10) Reviews

• 
  Wil Wheaton

  I hate to say this, because I love this series, but this book is awful. For a book that's supposed to encourage the reader to make decisions which lead to many different stories and endings, it doesn't feel like the reader has much agency.
  
  Instead of giving us choices that lead the reader on various exciting adventures, each decision is either good or bad. Good choices keep the story going, and bad choices lead to abrupt and unsatisfying endings. There's one good path through this book, and if you aren't on it, it's frustrating and not very fun to read.
  
  Skip this title, and read one of the other classics in this series.
  
• 
  Jeffrey Caston

  Overall entertaining. I am not crazy about the revised artwork. And I am starting to notice that the volumes, once Chooseco got a hold of them, seem to focus more on having a larger number of potential endings. That doesn't add much, in my humble opinion. But overall entertaining and I am glad I got it.
• 
  Josiah

  Are we ready for some early R.A. Montgomery? The Lost Jewels of Nabooti isn't his weirdest gamebook, but it has its moments. New Orleans, Louisiana: you are on summer vacation when a telegram arrives from your cousins Peter and Lucy in Boston. The Jewels of Nabooti—two diamonds and two rubies their father purchased years ago from a Moroccan merchant named Abdul Said—have been stolen. When their father died a while back, he made Peter and Lucy promise to "Protect the jewels at all costs." He believed the jewels held strange powers that could change the course of mankind's future. Over the years he received threatening messages demanding the jewels be returned to the Nabooti tribe in Africa, but he refused. Peter and Lucy don't know who has taken the jewels, but they refuse to let the perpetrator get away with it, and they need your help. The mission is dangerous—an anonymous person or group uses aggressive intimidation tactics against you more than once before you're even able to meet up with your cousins and hear the full story—but you're not easily deterred. Are you ready to hop a plane to Paris in pursuit of your first solid lead?
  
  You can solicit the help of an old friend like Beech Muzzwell, a private detective, but for the most part in these pages you're on your own. You are bound to be surveilled wherever you go; on the plane to Paris a mustachioed man tries to secretly ally with you, but can you trust him? The steady stream of violent threats aimed your way is coming from somewhere, and this man may have bad intentions. At the Paris airport a strange man and woman demand you come with them to Morocco; if you refuse, you are framed as a smuggler and detained by the French police. Will they believe you if you tell them the truth about the Jewels of Nabooti? The authorities can offer only so much protection, and once you set foot in Morocco you'll be taking your life in your hands. Will you carry a firearm to defend yourself, or trust your wits to do the job? You may wind up locating the jewels with ease, or dying at the hands of terrorists. Even if you're savvy, the results are mostly luck.
  
  If you go with the man you met on the plane to Paris you may meet an African operative named Molotawa who has a connection to the Nabooti tribe. You're on the trail of something big, as indicated by a flurry of attempts on your life. The police are usually willing to assist if you tell them about the jewels, but they can't direct your mission. Should you arrange a meeting with the Nabooti tribe near Lake Chad in Africa? Would they welcome you...or surround your aircraft with guns? How you react in a hostile situation may be the difference between triumph and death. Consulting a shaman will send you to the Mountains of the Moon or the Zaire River; there are multiple pathways to a positive ending. Are the jewels in Paris, Morocco, or back in Boston? Are you willing to risk death to retrieve them for Peter and Lucy? If you survive all the explosions and bullets to end up with the jewels, you may be able to use them to forward the cause of world peace in a way not previously possible. It makes these past few stressful days worth the sacrifice.
  
  The Lost Jewels of Nabooti can't be categorized as a success. The story is all over the place, internally consistent only on rare occasion, and most paths end abruptly with no degree of satisfaction. There could have been an elegant overarching narrative that all sub-plots neatly fit within, but instead we get a poorly executed concept with minimal imagination and seemingly no effort to do better. The book isn't exactly boring, so I'll consider rating it one and a half stars, but R.A. Montgomery is capable of a lot better.
• 
  Nick

  Taking a break from my Stephen King re read marathon, this was a nice short fun CYOA. In fact, out of the 4 book box set I bought, this one had the best plot lines that were actually coherent and grounded. I don't know if that means children would like it better but I sure did.
  
  Yes alot of choices were instant bad endings for sometimes no reasons at all and sometimes they were sudden but it was a nice mix of endings. Finding the jewels and protecting them and keeping the peace were the goals and out of 38 endings 9 were solid good endings, 12 were so-so and 17 I deemed bad for the the reader.
  
  I'm glad I bought the box set. The 4 books were nostalgic and a nice trip into child hood memory.
• 
  Patrick Book

  A rollicking story, and only slightly problematic! Way too many branching paths in a row to keep track of though. Rearrange that business, Montgomery
• 
  David Sarkies

  A quest for some magical jewels
  21 July 2012
  
  Well, when I first went to select this book the cover was unrecognisable and I thought for a moment that I may not have read it. However I noted that the first cover that appears is the cover of the reissued version and that when I found the original cover memories of this book did come back. Further, when I read the blurb and one of the commentaries I remembered this book, but like the commentator that I read I don't remember coming to a successful conclusion. In fact the difficulty with these books is that the successful conclusion is not always obvious. I do still have two of them up the back, but one of them is
  The Cave of Time so I guess I won't be getting any successful endings from that one.
  
  This book involves the theft of some sacred jewels of a lost African Tribe from the Louvre. Apparently these jewels are magical and have the power to unite the world under a single government and usher in an era of world peace. Sounds pretty ridiculous to me, and the idea of a world government is pretty scary, particularly understanding human nature. We all wish for world peace, and some of us have the misguided idea that a one world government would bring that about. Sure, there will be peace, but usually after all of the opponents of the government are killed off, and once that happens the government is then likely to turn on anybody that they consider to be a threat to stability and in turn kill them off as well.
  
  Apparently this book is rubbish and lacks a lot of continuity. Personally, I will go with the commentators opinion since I do remember that these books tended to be quite difficult to solve. Then again, unlike the Fighting Fantasy series, it is never always clear whether you reached a successful ending. At least with the Fighting Fantasy books you know that you have completed the game successfully when you finally turn to the last paragraph. Okay, not all of them are like that, but even
  Demons of the Deep, where the successful conclusion is hidden within the book, you are still quite aware that you have reached the successful ending as opposed to the not so successful, but you managed to survive, endings.
• 
  Rachel Brown

  Read some of this at a friend's house. I've read a lot of CYOAs, and this one made the least sense of any I can recall.
  
  The outcomes seemed to have no relation to the choices. The plot made no sense. Yes, there are supposed to be multiple plotlines, but in other CYOAS, there are multiple coherent stories. This one was basically completely unconnected scenes occurring for no reason. It also had really a lot of points where no choice went anywhere.
  
  Many points of divergence went like this:
  
  - YOU decide to help your friends track down the lost jewels of Nabooti, last seen in Morocco. But your friends tell you to go to Paris.
  
  Go to Paris, go to Morocco, or ask a different friend for advice?
  
  - You go to Paris. Your plane is hijacked and flown to China. THE END.
  
  - You go to Morocco. But you can't find anyone who's heard of the jewels. You give up and go back to America. THE END.
  
  - You ask a friend for help. He tells you to meet him in a cafe. The cafe is blown up by terrorists. THE END.
  
  I read through a bunch of storylines over half an hour, and never even got close to the jewels. Boo.
• 
  Kyla

  It is a good book but a ton of things are happening as once in a good way, which is why I like it. This was the very first Choose Your Own Adventure that I have ever read in my entire life. Now I like Choose Your Own Adventure books. I liked it because I got to be the one to choose what I do but I don't really know what is going to happen next.
• 
  Jorge Rosas

  This one was complicated, and you only get a few satisfactory endings, but it’s always fun to read every possible outcome.
• 
  Dane Barrett

  The Lost Jewels are a mcguffin.
  
  This book is less about the jewels and more about an insane amount of paranoia and chases as people are either trying to ally with you or kill you, or a bit of both with some timely double-crosses.
  
  You are tasked to help two friends find their lost jewels which have been stolen (and weren't very well protected in the first place) which will lead you on a globe-trotting goose-chase in which you have to decide who to trust and who to escape from. Literally everyone seems to be after these things, and while you're brought in to help because you are unknown to those seeking the jewels it only takes a few short minutes before absolutely everyone seems to know you're searching for them.
  
  The book can be fun, especially when there is a chase going on (usually you running for your life), but many of the endings end up being like, "Oh you went through all that trouble? The jewels were safe here all along!" or even one moment in which they mysteriously appear in your pocket.
  
  A bit of fun silliness which you'll hate if you try to take it too seriously.
• 
  Brittany

  I enjoyed this because it’s a choose your own adventure, but the characters were all dubious. I trusted no one. I felt rather thrown into the adventure without much set up. I did get what would be considered a good ending, but I’m really gonna need to re-choose some options to see more of the story.
• 
  Tory Wagner

  My children have fond memories of reading these "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories. We have a family bookclub and my granddaughter chose this one. It's a great way to get children excited about reading and is palatable for adults!
• 
  Alex

  Eh, no me gustó el final que me tocó. Si, si. Ya se. Es pura y exclusivamente mi culpa. He abandonado la búsqueda.
• 
  Remo

  La serie de Elige tu propia aventura es, literalmente, un clásico de nuestra infancia. He releído algunos, años después, y me parecen un poco cortos de miras, limitados en las posibilidades, pero cuando tenía 10 años cada uno de ellos era una maravilla lista para ser explorada hasta que hubiera dado todo lo que tenía dentro.
  Al final siempre sabías que ibas a recorrer todos y cada uno de los caminos posibles. La emoción estaba, por tanto, en ganar y pasarte la historia al primer intento. Si no podías, pues nada, seguro que en el intento 18 acababas encontrando el camino. A veces los autores iban "a pillar", poniéndote los resultados buenos detrás de decisiones que eran claramente anómalas. Éste era uno de los malos de la serie, donde cualquier decisión no estándar te llevaba a una muerte/desaparición rápida. No parece que aquí hubiera mucha capacidad de elección en realidad.
  Recuerdo haber aprendido tanto palabras como hechos y datos en estos libros. No nadar contra la corriente cuando quieres llegar a tierra, dónde colocarse cuando un avión va a despegar, un montón de cosas interesantes y un montón de historias vividas, decenas por cada libro, que convirtieron a las serie en una colección fractal, donde cada vez podías elegir un libro nuevo entre los que ya tenías.
  Llegué hasta el tomo 54 y dejé de tener interés por la serie, pero la serie siguió hasta superar los 100 títulos. Tal vez mis hijos quieran seguir el camino que yo empecé. Si quieres seguirlo, pasa a la página 7.
• 
  Brian Umholtz

  This is more like it. The new artwork is much better than I expected (out of the few new editions I've seen so far) and the endings made a little more sense. The one real drawback I found was finding out the online-only ending featured inside is
  no longer available. Otherwise, The Lost Jewels of Nabooti is paced well and fun to read.
  
  Although there were a couple 'throwaway' endings, they didn't distract me too much from the experience of the journey. While it isn't all about the fighting and running, this book reads like a good young adult's action movie. There are moments of thrilling adventure as well as tough decisions to make when "you" finally have time to take a breath. Mr. Montgomery stayed on task here and made sure that rereading for different endings is rewarding since some of the world-building and character personality traits callback to different story branches. I had fun trying to balance my instincts with what I already knew about the world in here.
  
  I would say this is a very good book to start a young reader off with if you'd like to start your child off into the roots of modern interactive fiction and aren't worried about being a series completionist. Enjoy.
• 
  Pradnia Pramitha

  Dari tiga kali percobaan, percobaan pertama saya berakhir di dalam pesawat yang dibajak dan menuju China tanpa tahu apakah nantinya akan selamat atau tidak. Percobaan kedua dipastikan saya selamat namun saya membatalkan misi karena takut duluan. Percobaan terakhir, saya berhasil mengembalikan permata Nabooti kepada sang Raja, sumber dari segala kebajikan, tapi terlalu mudah dan tidak ada petualangannya.
  
  Ketika membaca buku seperti ini yang jalan ceritanya bergantung pada pilihan kita, kita barangkali hanya membaca sekitar 10-15 halaman saja dari total 121 halaman yang ada. Novel bisa menjadi sekedar cerpen kalau berakhirnya terlalu cepat kan..
  
  
  Saya dapat bentuk pdf buku ini dari ebukulawas.blogspot.com, cukup ketik saja judul buku di kolom pencarian.
• 
  Jonathan

  After reading a bunch of very early Montgomery CYOAs I was pleased to discover that The Lost Jewels of Nabooti has a halfway coherent plot. Sure, there are some sudden and unsatisfying endings, but each story branch feels consistent with the larger theme, rather than Montgomery’s characteristic method of writing 40 ideas on sticky notes, blindfolding himself, and throwing a dart to see where the story goes next.
  
  It is a crying shame that the ChooseCo reissues don’t include any titles by Packard. The kids today are being cheated. On a positive note, the new illustrations utilise first-person perspective, meaning that like the text, the gender of the protagonist is left to the reader’s imagination.
• 
  Katharine Ott

  "The Lost Jewels of Nabooti" - written by R A Montgomery and published in 1982 by Bantam. "You will be relatively safe, as safe as anyone can be on the trail of the Jewels of Nabooti." This Choose Your Own Adventure story casts you back and forth in the book, as you choose one of two possible actions and are directed to a specific page in the book to continue the adventure. I tried out several different scenarios, but never did really solve the mystery. Is the object of the book to keep trying different outcomes until you reach the last page? This durable series has a well-deserved positive reputation for the younger crowd, but the format did not really appeal to me.
• 
  Courtney

  Bash, age 9, and I are still trying to find these jewels in a satisfying way. I believe we've read 5 different versions of the story, now. One ended in failure, 3 in death and one in the jewels already being found and we just kinda latched onto the success. This is the only book since the Elephant and Piggie series that Bash is excited to read. CYOA was my favorite series when I was his age and I'm so glad we've tried one. We will definitely read many more!
• 
  Jackson

  I love these types of books. They are quick, fun, and mysterious. So your mission is to find the lost jewel of Nabooti without getting caught or dying whatsoever. There are multiple endings in the book. Some of the endings can be good or bad, but eventually you will still find the way to the jewels. There are multiple types of these books you can find at your local store. 4/5 short read, fun, and mysterious. One thing he could have improved on was making it longer in my opinion.
• 
  Truly

  Akhirnya punya ini juga.
  SAlah satu serunya membaca buku ala ini adalah kita tak pernah tahu apa yang akan kita hadapi. Harus bijak melangkah jika tidak ingin cerita berakhir dengan cepat.
  Entah kenapa, buku ini seakan mempertegas bahwa permata yang indah sering kali dibarengi dengan kutukan yang menakutkan. Seimbangkah?
• 
  Lolly

  I wanted a book that would last me two hours ( on the road) and this was the one I reached for. Unfortunately, it took me ten minutes to die repeatedly and then finally get the good ending. Quick, fun read. Probably a better idea for younger children though... (^_^;)
• 
  Benjamin Stahl

  Pretty fun. The ending for me was a bit of a letdown.
• 
  Alex

  Dead.