The California Gold Rush: An Interactive History Adventure

I teach fourth grade and my students LOVE this book. They cannot get enough of it.

I read these books with my 8-year-old daughter for fun. We play a game where one of us reads aloud and the other gets to make the choices of which path to take. In this volume, the main character is a young White man, and I guess that is a drawback since we don't get to explore the choices women had during the California Gold Rush and we don't learn anything about the Chinese in California. That's really the only negative... it's the history of white men, no doubt about that. The editors did a better job with the Irish Potato Famine volume, where the main character's gender is left ambiguous and only through making choices does the character develop a masculine or feminine identity. I appreciate how the hallmark of a choose-your-own-adventure story, an untimely death, is maintained, but I also appreciate how the editors leave wiggle-room so that there is more than one way to achieve a happy ending to the journey. One of the possibilities here is, of course, striking it rich, but there are other options, such as becoming a merchant or returning back east having made a decent return on investment.