Can You Survive the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes?

Can You Survive the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? cover

Can You Survive the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? combines the interactivity of a choose-your-own-path book with three classic Sherlock Holmes stories: “The Red-Headed League,” “The Speckled Band,” and to say the other would be giving things away.

The reader gets to pretend to be Sherlock Holmes himself, which is fun, particularly as you can’t be too cautious. You’re told at the start that Moriarty may have sent you a case as a trap, but if you turn down too many, or you get too many deductions wrong, you might go out of business as a consulting detective.

Can You Survive the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? cover

Of course, if you’ve read the stories (and it’s a rare Sherlock Holmes fan who isn’t familiar with those two), you have a great advantage here. Even so, it’s fun to see how choices — and alternate endings — have been inserted into these familiar tales. You might solve the case, or you may fail, or you or your client might even die!

The publisher recommends this book (and others in the series, including ones for Dracula, The Wizard of Oz, and The Call of the Wild) for ages 9-13, and that seems about right. It would be fun to read this through with a child, argue about which choices to make, and then talk about how these versions compare to the original stories.

(Review originally appeared at the website belonging to I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, the premier Sherlock Holmes podcast.)



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