Silver Wings

Choose Your Own Adventure #123

by R.A. Montgomery, Vladimir Semionov (Illustrator)

Silver Wings by R. A. Montgomery takes YOU on an adventure flying above - or crashing into! - the Baja Peninsula. 9-12 year old readers will learn to perform under pressure, piloting a motor glider through inclement conditions, caring for navigator Isabel after she falls mysteriously ill, escaping the threat of violent bandits, and helping friends Peter and Josh after an emergency landing.

Choose Your Own Adventure Silver Wings is an interactive adventure book in which YOU decide what happens next.

After a year of flight training, a surprise trip to the Baja Peninsula puts your skills to the test - but will they be enough to earn you your Silver Wings? Do you rush immediately to your friends' downed plane or wait till nightfall? Do you follow the shady character you spot snooping around the plane or stay hidden out of view? Who do you think tampered with your radio?

For readers who enjoyed other titles from the Choose Your Own Adventure series, Struggle Down Under by Shannon Gilligan, Secret of the Ninja by Jay Leibold, and Smoke Jumpers by R. A. Montgomery.

Genres: Choose Your Own Adventure, Gamebooks, Childrens, Fiction, Adventure

144 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1992

About the author

Raymond A. Montgomery (born 1936 in Connecticut) was an author and progenitor of the classic Choose Your Own Adventure interactive children's book series, which ran from 1979 to 2003. Montgomery graduated from Williams College and went to graduate school at Yale University and New York University (NYU). He devoted his life to teaching and education.

In 2004, he co-founded the Chooseco publishing company alongside his wife, fellow author/publisher Shannon Gilligan, with the goal of reviving the CYOA series with new novels and reissued editions of the classics.

He continued to write and publish until his death in 2014.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Caston · Rating 1 out of 5]

Imagine this scenario...

You grew up loving as an author's unique books as a kid. You could spend hours upon hours reading one choose your own adventure after another, with one pile being the books to read, reading an adventure, putting that book into a "read" pile then going to the next book in the series, reading a story. Finish that story, add it to the read pile, pick up the next volume.

And so on...

I love these books. I loved them as a kid and RA Montgomery, no matter the reaction I had to this one will always have a special place in my heart.

Fast forward--uh, maybe more than a few years. I'd managed to get a battered second-hand copy of Silver Wings recently. I hadn't read that one when I was young. I think I had moved on to other reading by the time this one came out. I was pretty excited to find this one in a book store. The older CYOAs are pretty hard to find.

I'm sitting down, go through a few pages, and then it tells me to go to page 30. I do that. But page 30 is actually an illustration. Huh. That's weird. Maybe it is actually a reference to page 31 with page 30 the related illustration.

Nope. Makes no sense in the narrative. I finally figure out there was some misprint and I was supposed to have gone to another page. I'm irritated but then I let it go. Life's too short, right? But then the page I was apparently supposed to go to sends me to ANOTHER page that's wrong.

Long story short(er), I go to the internet and find out the company published an errata notice saying it had a complete fubar in the publication process where ALL the page directions are wrong. The "downloaded" the wrong file or something to the printer. That seems pretty lame to me. I can't see how a publisher wouldn't have checked the final product before it gets shipped out. Sounds like later publications fixed that, but that hardly helps now. This book is effectively unreadable.

So suffice it to say, I won't be lovingly returning to this one. I'm not even sure I should keep this. But I don't want to donate or sell it, lest someone else go through what I did.

At some point if I can come across a corrected version I may give this one a try. But for now, this one is going to be a disappointing one star for me.

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

Looked like a good book but it was printed wrong or something and the book ended after the first page!

[Dane Barrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

You'll be 13 pages in before your first choice, but overall its quite a fun little story. This is the tale of two gliders who hit mechanical trouble while flying over Mexico. When one glider goes down, it is up to the reader (the pilot of the second glider) as to the next course of action to follow. Each path can lead to lengthy glider sequences, or encounters on the ground. Overall its actually a good read from Montgomery, and even avoids his usual extraterrestrial encounter pitfall that he commonly put into his older books. Note that this is one of the later CYOA adventure books, so the variation of paths isn't great, but there's enough for a fun night's read.

[Enemby · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting book, but it's short length handicaps the idea of a choose your own adventure, since there's one or two 'right' choices that you must find one by one. I've read it years ago, and I still find it dissatisfying for that reason.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

read for my summer reading challenge...loved these books when I was a kid.

[Patrick Book · Rating 3 out of 5]

It stays on topic more than some.

[Jewels · Rating 1 out of 5]

A long wait until you start making choices and many of the page jumps have you jumping to storylines that don't make sense.

[Lynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

My brother devoured these books when we were younger. He was an avid reader and really good at it. I can't believe these kept his interest. I had a really tough time with the lack of flow from page to page - especially on the pages where it told you to go to a specific page rather than to choose between a few pages.