Item - Search for the Mountain Gorillas

This book is the author's first and is apparently based partially on his real-life experiences. For some reason I failed to find the book terribly engaging, though it's well-written and has some good moments. Perhaps the problem is simply that this book isn't nearly as outlandish as the last few and feels too restrained in comparison. It might also be that the reader has very little control in the story; often your choices involve who to follow rather than where to lead people, and quite a few major events happen without allowing you any input.

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I found this impossible to really get into.
There's few action parts, which get cut too short.
Rating: 2/10

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Most authors write from personal experience, but Jim Wallace did it more elaborately than perhaps any Choose Your Own Adventure contributor, as we see in his debut, Search for the Mountain Gorillas. A writer and photographer for the magazine African Naturalist, you are sent to a wildlife preserve in Uganda called the Impenetrable Forest, where gorillas were recently sighted for the first time. You and zoologist Ed Kiwanuka are driving into the area in a Land Rover when you're stopped by trees piled across the road. Is it the work of poachers, an increasing problem in the Impenetrable Forest? Darkness falls by the time you clear the trees; you could camp here overnight, but perhaps you're better off entering the forest now to meet up with your contact Mweri, a local tracker of gorillas.

Drive into the forest tonight and Mweri isn't at his outpost, but he shows up if you wait. Soon the three of you are tracking gorillas, until a nearby resident tells you his daughter is missing and he suspects a gorilla nabbed her. You can join the search, but beware of rampaging water buffalo; survive that and you may earn a happy ending for the man and his daughter. Leave the man to search on his own and you get much closer to the gorilla family, but a rogue silverback challenges the peace. If he turns violent toward the baby gorillas, should you intervene or accept nature's course? The consequences of your choice can be grave. If you originally left the outpost before Mweri arrived, you and Ed track a family of nine gorillas, but a poacher trap injures Ed and you have to continue after the gorillas solo. Take the time to construct your own rain shelter, and a movie crew disturbs your observation of the gorillas, sending the animals fleeing in panic. If you ask the crew for help in just the right manner, you wind up with a one-of-a-kind article for African Naturalist. Maybe you and the movie crew never cross paths, in which case you get closer to the gorillas than you dared hope. A baby gorilla toddles up and reaches for your camera, but should you hand over the expensive equipment or be firm and refuse? Your decision could be the difference between triumph and failure for your magazine piece.

Had you set up camp that first night instead of entering the forest, you meet Gorilla Sanctuary warden Per Halvorsen and his associate, Jonathan. Decline Halvorsen's invitation to stay at park headquarters, and you and Ed meet up with Mweri to track gorillas and might happen upon a starving baby gorilla in a cage. You name her Surprise; can you nurse her back to health or is she beyond saving? In an alternative story route, Mweri cautions you against following gorillas near a volcano; if it turns active, scalding crevasses open up and falling in means death. Survive the volcano and you stumble across a misty meadow. Wait...are those animals in the meadow dead? You've found a sobering natural phenomenon, and if you live, the visuals will haunt you. Did you earlier agree to let Halvorsen guide you, and delay meeting Mweri? During your first sighting of the gorilla family, Jonathan clumsily scares them off. Postpone pursuit, and when you do catch up you are confronted by a young male gorilla that could get violent. If you immediately follow after Jonathan frightened the gorillas, you learn his mistake wasn’t innocent; should you voice your concerns to Halvorsen, even if Jonathan loses his job? When Ed falls into a poacher's pit, you could be killed by a leopard. Circle back to the gorillas and the same leopard is attacking a baby gorilla; should you interfere to save its life? If you took an extended break after freeing Ed from the pit, you meet Mweri back at camp and he reports a cholera outbreak. Continue with your expedition and it becomes clear he has the disease and you might too. Your race against cholera is now top priority, but death won't surrender easily.

Enhanced by Jim Wallace's experiences in 1970s Uganda, Search for the Mountain Gorillas is one of the better books through forty-one in the original Choose Your Own Adventure series. Some endings hold real emotion, and the story's message is evergreen: when getting to know people or creatures who are exotic to you and maybe even dangerous, every choice you make is instrumental in whether you connect on a deep level or scare each other off. Allow yourself to be vulnerable, reach out, and success will be the sweetest you ever encounter. Not every ending is deep, and the frequency with which Mweri's advice is dead wrong causes me to wonder if having him is worth the trouble, but the book is good. Turning your own unique personal adventure into a story that's compelling to others isn't easy, but Jim Wallace did a more than decent job.

More reviews by KenJenningsJeopardy74

Search for the Mountain Gorillas is one of the few Choose Your Own Adventure books in which your character is an adult instead of a teenager. This book has you playing a photo journalist for the African Naturalist magazine who has been assigned to do a picture story on the endangered mountain gorillas in the Impenetrable Forest of Uganda. The purpose of the outcome of your assignment is to raise awareness and, consequently, funds to help establish a preserve, a sanctuary of sorts, for the few remaining mountain gorillas facing constant threats from hunters and herdsmen alike.

It was noticeable that, for a book based in a location as remote as a jungle, you come across a wide cast of human characters. Consequently, this book explores more types of different human dynamics than one would expect. From the very beginning you team up with a zoologist from the University of East Africa and a gorilla tracker (whose association is indeterminable from a reading of the book). You additionally come across park rangers, poachers, and even a film crew. Having personally never been to a jungle expedition of the sort that is the subject of this book, I am reluctant to say that your interactions with these vastly different groups of people are realistic. However, I can confidently say that your interactions are very different with members of each of these groups. The characters definitely have at least a shallow degree of depth to them; they are concerned with very different things and you learn very different things from them.

This book provides introductory insight into the sorts of things that park officials are concerned with: insufficiency of funds to build and maintain viable sanctuaries for endangered species, insufficiency of public support to help the parks meet their objectives, offers from zoos based in prosperous countries that run contrary to the park’s mission, bureaucratic corruption, and illegal hunting to name just a few. At the same time, on the other side of the coin, you also get a glimpse into the desperation of the locals. Destitute, squalid, and faced with limited opportunities to feed their families, some locals inexorably become poachers—they can apparently profit very handsomely by capturing and illegally selling baby gorillas. While the book surely discusses the illegality of poaching and the prospect of prison for the perpetrators, I can’t help but wonder whether imprisonment is an appropriate or sufficient deterrent if the underlying problem of poverty due to a lack of economic opportunity is never solved. The ethics and legality of poaching are definite philosophical implications of this book.

Getting to the book’s narrative storytelling, you are able to successfully complete your expedition in a minority of the endings. In others, you get to read about yourself falling short in many varied ways. Though this is a work of juvenile fiction, the bad endings, as is characteristic of children’s books of the era, routinely offer much to an adult’s jaded sensitivities. For example, you can read about how a poacher stabs you with his spear (pg. 86), how a blade-fitted hunting trap impales you (pg. 65), how a water buffalo gores you (pg. 116), and how a leopard mauls you (pg. 48). That said, the sense I got after reading this book was that the greatest dangers in jungles near human habitation are probably nothing more than the excessively ordinary human-designed booby traps meant to ensnare wildlife.

Search for the Mountain Gorillas has an excessively National Geographic quality to it; it reads more like a documentary than how other gamebooks read, like a movie. Given that the About the Author section explicitly states that Jim Wallace went on a mountain gorilla expedition during his three-year stint in Uganda, it stands to reason that this book is his offer of a travelogue to the world. The book has quite a bit of educational value to it if the information it contains is either somehow useful to the reader or is otherwise (at least) sufficiently interesting. For example, I learned about the formation of boiling steam geysers in crevasses (pg. 95), matsuko meadows (pages 35 and 51), and of the diet and nesting habits of mountain gorillas through this book.

Search for the Mountain Gorillas is internally highly consistent, which is normally a plus for gamebooks. But, in this case, because all the branching stories were very similar to one another, I felt that it only ever managed to strike a single note which made it quite monotonous. This book suffered from a lack of variety and a gamebook need not be only internally inconsistent to accomplish this. I suspect that this was the reason why I struggled keeping track of the narrative branches that I was coming off of in this book. I normally don’t have trouble with this.

Search for the Mountain Gorillas offers a straightforward story that is almost a journalistic account. It’s not completely devoid of excitement but it’s not particularly fun. It’s ultimately, as stated earlier, a travelogue that is capable of being imaginative only within the narrow scope that defines it. I don’t have it in me to say that it’s a bad book though I will say that it is undoubtedly slightly below par, notwithstanding Ron Wing’s solid artwork.

Rating: 4.5/10.0

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