Typhoon!

Choose Your Own Adventure #162

by Edward Packard, Tom La Padula (Illustrator)

The reader is the navigator on a research ship soon to be engulfed by a raging typhoon and can finish the story in a variety of ways.

Genres: Choose Your Own Adventure, Fiction

113 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1995

About the author

Edward Packard attended and graduated from both Princeton University and Columbia Law School. He was one of the first authors to explore the idea of gamebooks, in which the reader is inserted as the main character and makes choices about the direction the story will go at designated places in the text.

The first such book that Edward Packard wrote in the Choose Your Own Adventure series was titled "Sugarcane Island", but it was not actually published as the first entry in the Choose Your Own Adventure Series. In 1979, the first book to be released in the series was "The Cave of Time", a fantasy time-travel story that remained in print for many years. Eventually, one hundred eighty-four Choose Your Own Adventure books would be published before production on new entries to the series ceased in 1998. Edward Packard was the author of many of these books, though a substantial number of other authors were included as well.

In 2005, Choose Your Own Adventure books once again began to be published, but none of Edward Packard's titles have yet been included among the newly-released books.

Reviews

[Josiah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Choose Your Own Adventure had several natural disaster books. Volcano!, Hurricane!, and Earthquake! were among them, and Typhoon! could be considered the last before the original series wrapped its run a little over twenty books later. You are part of a team on the sloop Allegro, out sailing the South Pacific to observe humpback whales. You departed from the island republic of Naruba less than a week ago with your friend Wanda Vivaldi and others, but this morning you awaken to waves throwing the boat. A typhoon is barreling toward Naruba and will soon hit the area the Allegro currently sits in. As navigator it's your job to avoid the sea cyclone, but should you tack to the right of the storm, the left, or race against it to relative safety on Naruba?

Pick the wrong side of the typhoon and your adventure comes to an abrupt, violent end. You cannot survive the strongest part of it. Get on the lee side, though, and the Allegro is sturdy enough to emerge intact. A leak, however, could sink you before you're able to harbor in Naruba. You can set out with just Wanda on a small life raft in search of help, but the ocean holds dangers you didn't have to consider on the Allegro. Sharks pummel the raft and could overturn it, but worse is the peril of death by dehydration. If you take advantage of wind gusts to reach Naruba faster you'll run across a pair of men in their own boat, but you'd rather not have met their sort. Armed with guns, the men try to steal what little water you and Wanda have on the raft. You are dizzy from hunger and thirst, but smart strategy can give you the jump on them and allow you to survive. If you never run into the two men, you may wind up on a deserted island, finding a cache of gold bars that would represent extravagant wealth back in the real world. If you load the gold on your raft and set sail again, what are your chances of reaching civilization in time to save yourselves and send help for the Allegro?

You could head for Naruba in the Allegro as soon as you hear of the typhoon, setting up a race to shelter before it hits in full fury. There's a chart across pages sixty-two and sixty-three to inform your decision based on recent depth readings. If you interpret it wrong you'll run the Allegro over a reef and be doomed, or end up somewhere you can't access land as the typhoon sweeps in and kills you, but one destination has potential for you to survive. Once in the lagoon, you'll want to reach solid ground quickly, but even then you won't be out of jeopardy. The palace of Naruba is ahead; the typhoon knocked out electrical power, but the real danger comes from Dieno, an assassin bent on killing Naruba's president. Should you try to stop him yourself, or let others deal with the gunman? You can't prevent the president's murder, but the right choices will save you from the storm and bring Dieno to justice. You never expected anything like this when you set out six days ago to view humpback whales.

Not all the action in Typhoon! is electrifying as it should be, but the book isn't bad. The most evocative scenes aren't the raging storm, but rather being out on that raft with Wanda on the massive ocean, sharks and who knows what else stalking you beneath waves still choppy from the maniacal weather. These are the moments I felt pulled in by, typhoon or no typhoon. I wouldn't call this book a series highlight, but it provides a thrill or two, and is a different take than Richard Brightfield's Hurricane! on the concept of a tropical cyclone at sea. The nautical navigation decisions tended to trip me up, and I wish there weren't so many endings that neglected to mention what happened to the Allegro after you and Wanda leave for help, but I'd read this book again.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I've shot men whose lives were worth more than yours", she exclaimed cold as ice.

[Quote translated from German.]

Typhoon! is one of those choose-your-own-adventure books I bought as a kid and absolutely loved back then. I remember grabbing it from the book store and being a bit disappointed that they didn't have any CYOA books on the shelf that day with a subject or setting that I was more interested in, since I never cared much about nautical stuff, but then being positively surprised when I read it at home and loved it. Kid-me gave this one a full 10/10 rating and called it a favorite of the series.
So, as an adult, still having a handful of these books on my shelf, I was curious if this one would hold up in any way all these years later. After all, I still had a genuine blast reading reading Through The Black Hole as an adult. And both of them were written by Edward Packard himself who is credited for popularizing the whole CYOA genre.

Typhoon! has you be the navigator on a boat trying to navigate your friends through the waves of an oncoming typhoon somewhere in tropic water. There is some neat stuff where at one point the book actually shows you a map of surrounding waters and have you decide what path to try though I would have liked to have more like that.
The story itself is pretty good though, as far as CYOA books go, because it's a bit more focused than a lot of other books of its kind where it just flipflops all over the place. There still are surprises in here that can show up a bit out of nowhere, but there is an overall thread that works to make it coherent enough. The endings are pretty satisfying as well and it doesn't have as many early dead-ends as other books I've read.

I don't agree with my childhood self that this is a full-on 10/10 book of its kind, but I do agree that it is one of the better ones I've read. Certainly much better than Packard's own classic Sugarcane Island, I would say.

[Sheila Read · Rating 5 out of 5]

the adventures that I went through when I was bored I just read these books over and over again you would never get to the end of the story.