Review: An old concept reinvented
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 15, 2014
The author refers to this as Choose Your Own Adventures for adults. That's a pretty accurate description of this book. Choose Your Own Adventure was a fun concept when I was young, but there was always room for improvement, and until now, no one's bothered to conquer interactive fiction like it (at least that I've come across).How to Be Bad reads like a CYOA, but has a darker and more humorous tone, and my favorite part is the fact that no matter what path you choose, you get a different outcome, but a full story (I read it twice) as opposed to the old CYOAs, which read more like a game or a maze: You hit a dead end, backtrack, and take another route. It didn't feel like a book. How to Be Bad has a story, and a good one, written sharply by Michael La Ronn.I was skeptical going into this. It felt as if you had no real control over the outcome because every chapter starts in the same place, but the catch is that later in the book, the decisions you made in earlier chapters become relevant and control your outcome in such a clever way that it's almost distracting because you're wondering how the writer put it together so well.This seemed like quite a task to take on, and I can't quite wrap my brain around exactly how it was done, but kudos to the writer for pulling it off. I look forward to more of the same by him.