Spy Trap

I remember being 9 years old and loving this series. This one was one of the best of the bunch. Fantastic gift idea for any imaginitave 8-12 year old kid into books. This would be a great $2 gift to spring before a road trip or airplane ride. Hours of enjoyment, old-school style!

From the cover: You are a clever American spy. Your code name is Jonah. On a special mission to Deception Island off the coast of Greenland, you discover a secret of worldwide importance. But - for reasons you'll understand when you read the story - it may be dangerous to reveal this secret to anyone. What will you do? Be loyal and tell the U. S. Government? Or play it safe and keep the secret to yourself? 40 possible endings.

Awesome! Well written. The earlier series of these books were usally the best. The stories gradually turned into more kid fare as time went on. This being #6 in the series has you as a special intelligence agent out to foil the Russian's plan to intercept and decode the whale's complex song patterns before they dissappear during the winter. I was thinking to myself 'what in the heck does that have to do with national security?' Well, if you meet the right people and ask the right questions, you will be going, 'ohhhhh, I get it!' Along the way, there are greasy enemy agents on your trail, sting operations, car chases, questionable suspects, espionage, and deadly weapons. A treat!!

This was the first Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book that I everread, when my older brother brought it home from elementary school.After samping a large number of the series, it remains among the best. Even at a young age, my brother and I recognized the sheer number of kitschy lines invading this book. It had us in stitches, and I'm certain if either of us mentioned the title, we'd begin to recount our favorites. One that sticks in my head: "'I guess we can't count on you for anything, Jonah, so we'll have to count you out...' Those are the last words you ever hear."Ah, yes, the plot has something to do with your being a secret agent who has to save the whales. But who ever EXACTLY cared about the plots? It was all a matter of racing through the book to figure out every possible twist. Who can forget the hand-wringing tension of deciding which of four or five different spots would be the best to swim to? Or whether to secretly break into the bad guys rendez-vous house, or simply knock at the front door and bluff your way in? The KGB figures in somewhere, and all the villains are ridiculous Russian stereotypes (who look in the illustrations, if I remember correctly, oddly similar to Stalin, Kruchschev, etc.). This surely did derive from the collective Cold War imagination. I believe Trotsky is even mentioned by name, totally out-of-place, showing a complete disregard for not mixing up the historical facts in young children's brains. Oh, the flood of nostalgia! Of course, the copy my brother and I had eventually became so worn out, it had to be disposed of, and I've never seen another edition. If I ever found it in a used bookstore, I'd pay the price. But does anyone else remember this classic piece of camp? E-mail me, we'll rap about the glory days of the strange series, and its wonderful seventh volume.