Meanwhile: A Novel That Lets You Decide

Meanwhile by Jason Shiga

Why did I read it?

It was suggested to me at a reader's advisory workshop last year, and I happened to see it on the shelf yesterday. 

What happened?

Jimmy walks into an ice cream shop and has the choice of vanilla or chocolate ice cream. Sounds like the beginning of a normal book, right? Wrong! Have you ever read a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel? Well, this one is just like that...just on steroids and in graphic novel form.

Shiga pretty much gives you complete control of what happens in this novel. If you choose chocolate, then you follow the pipes to another page, where you will be faced with another choice. Each choice you make will decide whether or not Jimmy will wind up at home, with a stomach ache, attacked by a crazy ice cream shop owner,  traveling ten minutes into the past, or destroying the entire human race!

What did I like or not like?

Needless to say, this book is super cool. The design of the novel itself is ingenuitive as the pictures run vertical, horizontal, backwards, forwards, and up and down, and you jump from a page in the back to a page in the front to a page in the middle and back again as you continue to make choices.

Apparently, there are 3, 856 story possibilities, and as I've only figured out two of them so far, I'm going to hang onto the book for a little while (that is, if I can pry it out of the hands of my little brother hehe).