Journey Under the Sea (Choose Your Own Adventure, #2) by R.A. Montgomery

Journey Under the Sea (Choose Your Own Adventure, #2) Reviews

• 
  Jason Koivu

  As a Jay Leno-esque, Chinny McStrongchin looking character, you are off to explore the depths of the ocean with hopes of finding Atlantis. Let's go!
  
  1) On my first adventure I fought a ginormous squid, discovered an ancient Greek ship upon which was a map showing a tunnel to the center of the earth. I entered the tunnel and soon the water turned to gas and I had to dodge massive atoms. The world became a shade more psychedelic. Undefined presences surrounded me as I entered a thought world. I'd found Atlanteans! I stayed with them, studying for 1000 thought years and emerged to find the surface of the world quite different from when I left it.
  
  2) On the next adventure I was quickly eaten by sharks.
  
  3) I had another go, got saved by a dolphin (at this point I've noticed that there are a number of ways in which this book allows you to just give up), found and entered a grotto, which turned out to be Atlantis! I got a species-change operation and never returned to the surface again.
  
  4) In my final adventure I took my little underwater craft down into a canyon, where I found another grotto and a submarine. Inside the sub I received instructions on how to get to Atlantis. I met some folks, tried to help them overthrow a tyrannical king, and in order to do so I suggested we put on a play, naturally. In a roundabout way it worked!
  
  This book is just filled will fun adventures. And there are a bunch more endings, all of which look WAY more exciting than my adventures, if the illustrations by Paul Granger are anything to go by. There's some kind of wacky castle pool type thing, cyclones, whales, dudes wearing Kaiser helmets shooting lasers, a ghoulish scientist and more. If I'd come across any of that, this book would easily be four stars, maybe five!
• 
  Michael

  This book probably loses a star, because I made the mistake of buying the re-issue, rather than the original I read as a kid. They screwed up the artwork, first of all, replacing the original illustrations with lame sketches by cut-rate illustrators. The original art wasn't that great, either, really, but if they weren't going to improve on it, they should have kept it for nostalgia's sake. There have also been subtle edits to the text. I'm sure my 1978 edition never mentioned a "PDA," whatever that is.
  All that aside, though, I have to admit that this wasn't my favorite "Choose Your Own Adventure," even when I was a kid and had the "real" version. Unlike the others in the series, you role-played a boring grownup, instead of a kid on an adventure. The hero was a very manly male, too, as shown in those lamented illustrations (I recall a very square jaw), which would have a certain kitsch value now, but I found it off-putting at the time. The structure is weird, too. There are several quick dead-ends you have to navigate at the beginning, before you can start making choices that allow you to have any kind of adventure. I think I would get discouraged having to start over so many times and move on to something else. In fairness, the concept was fairly new in 1978, and they were still figuring out what worked best.
  Re-reading it as an adult, I had more patience, and I did find my way to some of the more exotic adventures tucked into the various storylines. They aren’t anything amazingly original, but they are fun. Next time I plan to review a “Choose Your Own Adventure,” though, I’ll hunt down an original edition.
• 
  Weathervane

  Good. Montgomery's prose leaves something to be desired, but the book is always imaginative.
  
  I disliked the way the Atlanteans were subtly different within each plot branch. It grew to be rather confusing, as you're always wondering whether they're the same group of people you met in your last read-through. Basically, internal consistency is low.
• 
  Jeffrey Caston

  I had a prior version back in the day. I liked this updated version. I wasn't crazy about the new artwork, but that wasn't much of an issue. Overall I liked it a lot.
  
  In this one you are a underwater explorer, primarily trying to find Atlantis. You fend off and/or flee from giant squid and sharks. You have to make decisions on whether getting the bends is worth it vs. the risk of getting bitten in half (okay it wasn't that graphic).
  
  The various adventures clipped along. The cover says it has 42 endings, which is pretty impressive for a volume spanning on 117 pages. It was a trifle obvious what would happen if you chose certain paths. To me they were obviously paths where you choose to give up on your passion. And the Atlanteans aren't shall we say, the warmest people on earth.
  
  I only maybe got to 10 different endings, so I will certainly be able to go back to this one, which is cool.
• 
  Nick

  Taking a small break from horrors and thrillers again. This CYOA, while entertaining, was all over the place and didn't deliver on an adequate ending. Your goal as a great underwater explorer was to discover Atlantis. So a perfect ending would have been to discover said city and return to land as a now famous and rich explorer. Something to that effect. While there were many endings with you discovering the city, many of them had you staying in the city in some form. Or returning before discovering. Or dying.
  
  You could get eaten by a shark, killed by a serpent, killed by a grouper.
  Get killed traveling to center of earth
  Have an operation to give you gills so you could live in Atlantis forever
  Become an advisor to the king of Atlantis. Become a famous musician in Atlantis. Help a revolution against the king of Atlantis. Flooded Atlantis by accident. Imprisoned in Atlantis. Become a prisoner in Atlantean zoo. Become frozen by a ray gun. Become an energy source and travel through time and space. Drowned numerous times. Saved by crew members but they don't believe your story. Etc etc etc.
  
  2.5 to 3 stars but still fun and entertaining
• 
  Betsy

  This series allows the reader to do something he or she may never in his/her own life be able to do...and choose his or her OWN adventure! Plus it is about the sea, which is totally rad! Don't settle for the outcome thrust upon you by society! Choose your OWN adventure man!
  
  I am currently trying to locate the publishers of "The Bible" (see my review of this book) and see if I could perhaps spearhead a project to convert it into a choose your own adventure book!
• 
  Arthur Graham

  Just thinking of this book is giving me the bends all over again...
• 
  Carol

  I learnt about these books last year, I can't even remember how I happened into them, it could've been my boyfriend telling me, or after reading about this somewhere else. Either way, we started looking for them ever since and we managed to download a few on Kindle, but the reading experience is a bit hard there.
  Finally I found these on my library and I decided to take this one out, which I saw had lots of endings. I absolutely loved it!!!
  This one has 42 different endings, and after reading the whole thing (which took me about 3 hours, because I was keeping track of my decisions to make sure I covered them all), it feels like I read 42 different stories. Each decision takes you to a completely different place, different adventure. You die more than once, you get pulled out of the search, you even find Atlanteans, but each time you encounter them they are different, they're not even the same Atlanteans, and I loved that, because it means you can go back, make different decisions and have a new adventure all together. And part of the amazingness of the book is that you can have very common endings (like the kind where you decide not to explore anymore so you go back to the surface and no Atlantis is found), simplistic ones (like when you decide to blow up something and you screw up everything), or really complex ones (where you find Atlantis and things turn into a really hard core scifi adventure with a different race).
  The writing is very simple, it couldn't have been done any other way I think, because you can't cram 42 endings with a complex narrative in such tiny books. You need something that takes you decision after decision quickly, and that makes you feel like all the adventure is under your control, which it totally is.
  I can't believe how much I enjoyed this. They might be made for kids, but man, this is great for adults, I haven't had this much fun playing with a book in forever. And never had I been able to make so many decisions on a story. I'm in love, I want to read them all.
• 
  M.L. Little

  A fourth-grader and I read this for two days straight, but somehow made only good decisions and came to a happy ending. He wanted to go back and read it again to see what else could happen, but ended up choosing a different book.
• 
  Lindsay

  That was my favorite one when I was young!
• 
  Mark Austin

  Ah, Choose Your Own Adventure, that paper bridge between that 5th grade fantasy map (see my Hobbit review) and my life-changing discovery of Dungeons & Dragons in the 7th grade.
  
  Some of them were great, some punishing, some arbitrary, but they revealed to me for the first time that I could make choices and that they had immediate effect the course on my (fictional) reality. For a kid whose home life felt largely hopeless and inescapable, the empowerment of making my own way by the power of my own choices and facing consequences traceable directly to my decisions - wow!
  
  While day-to-day reality seemed to deal out arbitrary, unpredictable punishments regardless of my actions, here was a place where I could experiment and learn and grow in safety and if I was punished there was always a why.
• 
  nov

  udah lama punya buku ini. waktu kecil di beliin papa di lapak2 buku bekas bareng setumpuk buku2 bekas lainnya. dulu papa kl pulang kerja emang hobi nyariin anaknya yang satu ini buku2 bekas di lapak2 pinggir jalan daerah jatinegara. tujuan awalnya sih biar hemat krn buku baru mahal. hehehe. tapi sekarang si papa agak tega soalnya anaknya gak pernah dibeliin buku2 bekas lagi alhasil uang bulanan cepet abis buat beli sendiri :p
  
  yang menarik dari buku ini karena buku ini gak cuma terdiri dari satu tapi banyak cerita. kalo baca ulang pasti ceritanya beda. kayak sulap emang bisa berubah2. dan kadang saya suka curang kl baca buku ini. kn di setiap halaman ada pilihan tuh, biasanya saya baca dua2nya trus pilih yang paling bagus dh :D
• 
  Jamie

  This was the first CYOA book I ever read. I read it in 4th grade, and was hooked on CYOAs. I remember being blown away by the concept of a book told in the 2nd-person.
  
  I cannot wait to introduce my own kids to these wonderful books.
• 
  Jeff Peacock

  This is a generic rating/review for this whole series. It was a favorite for me growing up in the 80s.. kind of a simpler off shot of early RPG’s and text based adventures that came into Vogue in the era
• 
  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.
  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 180 títulos. Tal vez mis hijos quieran seguir el camino que yo empecé. Si quieres que lo sigan, pasa a la página 7.
• 
  Glen

  Thanks NetGallery for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
  
  There is no fault with the writing and with the illustrations. When I saw the 'choose your own adventure', with the title, I knew I would hate the book. Then again, this book was constructed for a child.
  
  The book started out well enough, but the initial decision had me jumping from page 13 to 84. A long jump for an e-book. Trying to follow some of the branching's led me back and fourth. After a while I gave up and just paged through the book.
  
  I imagine that the writing and illustrations were a challenge to put together.
• 
  Jorge Rosas

  This one was heavy, there’s so many paths and ways to move around, and you can even end up in another line so easily, the endings are quite different and not many paths lead to the promised land.
• 
  Julie

  SO FUN I love choose your own adventure books
• 
  Cherise

  This was super fun to read. I learned very quickly that making logical choices was almost a surefire way to come to an untimely end, but that just made me want to read it over and over again as I tried to find the longer storylines and see what mysteries I could uncover.
• 
  Georgina Parkin

  My 3 year old liked both stories we got through tonight, both were pretty different but pretty cool. I didn’t think the illustrations were very good, and they took away from the experience a little (at least in the edition we read from)
• 
  David Sarkies

  The Quest for Atlantis
  17 June 2012
  
  I got this book at the same time that I got the first book in the series and as I mentioned before I was thrilled that my parents gave me these as a Christmas present as I have never heard of them before and the idea of having a book where you got to chose how the adventure unfolded was wonderful, especially as I was kid who was bored at the real lack of adventure games on the market. Then again, this was back in the days where only a few people had a games console and even less had a home computer. This was changing though with the Commodore 64 taking the developed world by storm, but games were still hard to come by, and somewhat expensive (though this has changed with the advent of the Internet).
  
  This story at first glance simply seemed to be borrowed from
  Jules Vernes'
  20 000 Leagues Under the Sea and in a way it is, but in a way it is not. This book actually has a plot in that you are an experienced deep sea explorer who has decided to set out to find the lost city of Atlantis. Once again I am unsure if there is one ending that could truly be considered the end and I am also unsure as to what happened once you found Atlantis (if you ever do).
  
  Atlantis has been a part of our cultural identity for millennia, ever since
  Plato first mentioned it in the
  Timeaus and the
  Critias. We are still unsure as to whether he was actually passing down a legend that Solon had learnt from Egypt or whether he was using this story as a way of developing his ideal political state. Many tend to lean towards the later, particularly when considering writings such as
  The Laws and
  The Republic. However, it is not necessarily in the ancient philosopher's repetiour to make things up but rather to refer to myth and legend as an example for the present day. While Plato may have been attempting to outline a system of government it is likely that he was drawing on a legend that, in reality, may not have been all that popular.
  
  Modern day ideas of Atlantis always seem to reflect an advanced culture that is hidden under the sea, a world of glass domes and fish men with technology far in advance of our own. Of course during a time when the ocean floors were still a mystery the possibility of such a place always hung at the back of our minds, however these days we will dismiss it out of hand - the sea floors have been mapped and no advanced civilisation has been found.
  
  On the other hand Verne does explore Atlantis in his book, however it is a submerged ruin of which only memories remain. Whether there is such a submerged ruin or not is yet to be fully determined, though there have been some strange discoveries in the Caribbean which allegedly includes a submerged Mayan Pyramid. My speculation though is that the stories of Atlantis all hail back to the antediluvian civilisation that was destroyed when God sent bucketloads of rain onto the Earth and spared only one man - Noah. Whatever you believe, well, Atlantis is and will always be a part of our subconscious and many more writers (including me) will continue to speculate on its origins and its destruction.
  
  
• 
  Rick Silva

  I didn't read this through to every possible ending, so there is some stuff here that I missed. My goal was to introduce the Kiddo to something I'd enjoyed as a kid, so we tried reading it for a few nights, going until we hit an ending. We ended up doing four, three of which took us through pretty sizeable portions of the book.
  
  The basic premise is that you are an undersea explorer following clues to the lost city of Atlantis. In our four run-throughs we found the expected dangers of giant quids, great white sharks, and hazardous deep-sea canyons, plus a surprising amount of focus of the dangers of getting a case of the bends from a fast retreat to the surface.
  
  More interesting were a couple of pathways that veered into serously psychadelic territory: realms of giant atoms, time travel, and beings of pure thought.
  
  This had a fun, anything-goes flavor. Like most Choose Your Own Adventure stories, the results of the choices eventually start to feel arbitrary. In one case, the bold choice kills you; in another it's the cautious approach that ends in your demise. There isn't really an strategy, and there is not a lot of consistency to the bits of character development that make it past the limitations of the format.
  
  Still, this was good nostalgic fun, and the Kiddo got a kick out of the idea of being in charge of the direction of the story. Recommended to try at least a few times for anyone with kids who have not experienced this style of storytelling. If nothing else, it will be a good experience to have under their belts for when it's time to introduce them to D&D!
• 
  Holden Attradies

  This one was pretty good. I would rate it in quality towards the top of the choose your own adventure books, maybe not the VERY top, but the upper middle.
  
  The story was quick paced enough and constantly engaging enough to have me and my 6 year old coming back until we had reached almost all the endings. I would say that there were perhaps too many endings, or maybe they were just spaced weirdly. They were very story arc ending heavy, so to get to most of them you had to re-read the first 3-10 pages of the story over and over again to get to them all.
  
  One thing I picked up on (that I'm not sure if my kido picked up on) was that there were many different versions of Atlantis to find, most of them not having been able to actual exist at the same time. I'm not sure if that's clear... In the
  The Abominable Snowman it felt like it was the same story but with many different endings to it, where as this book felt like many different story's start to finish. As an adult I noticed that lack of internal logic and it kind of bothered me (there was like 3 different versions of Atlantians living in a volcano of some sort, all totally non related, for example). But for a kid, I think that consistent stream of logic wasn't needed and at the very least he never complained about it.
• 
  Swankivy

  I read this Choose Your Own Adventure book as a kid, and though I loved the concept, I thought the different endings weren't fleshed out enough to be interesting. I loved science fiction and fantasy primarily because you got to explore new situations where the givens of your own life weren't given at all, and it bothered me that so little worldbuilding and character development for the people you met was offered in the story. It made the story seem gimmicky, focused entirely on "you get to pick what happens!" even though nothing that happens is particularly convincing. Even as a little kid I was annoyed that the Atlanteans as depicted in this story seem to have been in a bubble of time and wear what ancient Greeks wore, as if they (unlike modern-day Greek people) couldn't have evolved into an equally modern but different culture. I was mostly disappointed by this one because I felt like the author was trying to trick me and rip me off just because I was a kid and probably wouldn't notice that it was poorly conceived. I could always tell when adult writers thought that way about kids.
• 
  Dolly

  Our oldest has been bringing home various
  You Choose books from her elementary school library. And now at our local library we've discovered some of the books from the original
  Choose Your Own Adventure series that I read when I was a child. I remember loving books like this in my childhood and I am excited that our girls are discovering them as well.
  
  This book focuses on an undersea scientific exploration to find the lost city of Atlantis. Many of the paths took us on a sci-fi journey that we could hardly imagine, but the stories were dramatic and exciting.
  
  Overall, these are entertaining, though sometimes graphically violent stories. I tend to prefer the "You Choose" series because they have an educational and historical context, but the books in this series are interesting, too. We enjoyed reading this book together.
• 
  Sam

  a cant let down book!
  jaman waktu kecil dlu, buku ini menemani ke mana-mana, ceritanya mang pendek-pendek itu yg jd penghalang menikmatinya the fullest... tp kita dikasi 'power' untuk menentukan mau ke mana kita berikutnya dan semua pilihan itu merujuk kita pada pada suatu hal yg akan menentukan hasil akhir yang kita terima -- kapan lg bs menentukan ending cerita?
  
  kadang2 kalau sebel,
  aq runut ulang bacaannya dari awal trus pilih hal yg berbeda dengan tadi biar tau hasil lainnya seperti apa, hihi.. agak tricky for an adolescent tp begitulah, br ketauan pilihan mana yg paling menguntungkan dibandingkan yg lainnya... intinya kan buku ini for fun laaahhh :)
• 
  Colton

  It was pretty generic and the writing was subpar, but I had fun with this one. Judging from the title, you'd think this would be a pretty straightforward adventure. However, Montgomery loves his existential psychadelic mumbo jumbo, and there's a fair amount of it here. Considering this was the second book in the series, and the first one by Montgomery, it's only a shadow of what was to come. It's pretty good, but not very memorable. I'd still check it out.
• 
  Samantha Penrose

  I read this with my seven year old and was disappointed.
  I remember choose your-own-adventure books to be exciting and fun; something that you could read again and again... this one, however, seemed to push the message that "curiosity killed the cat." All of the exciting options ended with our demise!
  
• 
  Hellread

  In the end, this didn't feel like a journey. None of the endings were really satisfying. Decisions are simplistic, often don't matter and jump huge time spans. Coupled with little investment into anything and 50 variants on Atlantis, this feels spread too thin and plain uninteresting. At least it kept with the theme (more or less). Writing is "meh".