Douglas Terman (1933–1999)

Although it is only the third installment of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, By Balloon to the Sahara introduces some new elements to the series.

First, unlike the more fantastical settings of the first two books - a mysterious time cave and searching for the lost city of Atlantis - this entry into the series introduces the more grounded (pardon the pun) and classical adventure setting of a hot air balloon ride in France that goes out of control.

Second, this is the first Choose Your Own Adventure in which the reader is not alone during his adventure. This time, the reader is accompanied by his friends Peter and Sarah, and his dog Harry. Unfortunately, I keep referring to the reader as "he" because so far in the series no attempt is made to keep the reader gender neutral (cover art and illustrations also show the "You" of the story as a boy) on the off chance that there might be young girls out there who might be reading these books.

(On a side note, while considering my comments above regarding the lack of gender neutrality in the series, it occurred to me for the first time that the Choose Your Own Adventure series is written entirely in Second Person Narrative. Considering how uncommon second person POV is in literature, it is quite possible that the Choose Your Own Adventure series as a whole might be the largest work ever written in that style. Just a thought.)

Third and most surprising... Callbacks! The possibility never occurred to me while revisiting the previous two books in the series - especially the first, for obvious reasons - so I was pleasantly surprised when By Balloon to the Sahara referenced the first two books. The Cave of Time is not referenced as much as it's titular plot device makes a guest appearance in one of the storylines, when hiding from marauders in a cave leads to the choice of three differently colored doors. Not all of the story paths in the cave involve time travel, but the connection is clearly intentional. The callback to Journey Under the Sea is much more blatant, as one of the "good" endings results in the adventurous young reader being offered the chance to join an undersea expedition in a submarine called the Seeker.

Overall, By Balloon to the Sahara is a refreshing change of pace so early in the series, yet at the same time because of this it is a bit of a letdown. Being caught in a runaway balloon in a foreign country opens the doors to countless real-world adventure scenarios, and while the book does take advantage of that scenario with exposure to new cultures and environments grounded somewhat loosely in reality, it also provides more aliens and mystical worlds that we've seen in the previous two books. And while time travel and otherworldly encounters work when dealing with magic caves and underwater cities, throwing them into a globetrotting travel adventure doesn't quite work as well. Ending a story about traveling over the plains of Africa with a guy in white robes suddenly appearing at a marble temple saying "I have been expecting you" and revealing the secrets of the universe (spoiler alert) feels like a lazy attempt at filling a multiple ending quota. If By Balloon to the Sahara fails on any level, it is at living up to its potential.

A final thought... three deep into the Choose Your Own Adventure series, I suddenly find the preponderance of unpleasant deaths in the "bad" endings a little, well, unpleasant. Maybe it's the more realistic setting that resulted in this change of perspective, but stumbling upon these endings that involve drowning, freezing to death, or being crushed to death by a rockslide or avalanche in these more likely scenarios makes them a bit more real when you consider this is a children's (young adult?) novel. I wonder how many young readers were introduced to the first naked glimpse at their own mortality in the branches of one of these interactive storylines.… (meer)

One thing about stories (I will not use the term novel as that is a story written in a specific way and of a specific length) is the ability for them to take the reader or the listener to a place where they would not feasibly be able to go, and the Choose Your Own Adventure stories go one step further by putting you directly into the action by using the second person narrative and by giving you a choice as to what direction you take the adventure. The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks take you to another world (in a majority of cases) while the Choose Your Own Adventures tend to be set on Earth (well, most of them in any case).
The Sahara is one of those exotic places that I would love to go to, and I guess if I signed up for some short term mission work, or joined some aid agency, I might actually get to go there (and I shouldn't use age as an excuse, since I feasibly have another 60 years of my life to live, and hopefully I will still be cognisant and mobile near the end of that time). However the Sahara is a very dangerous place, and I am not simply taking about the fact that it is swarming with insurgents and bandits. It is an inhospitable place with no water and no vegetation, but it is still exotic. In fact I would like to go to Marakesh (which is on the edge of the desert in Morocco).
The title of this book also made me think of another Jules Verne story (one I haven't read) called Six Weeks in a Balloon (and many people seem to get this story confused with Around the World in Eighty Days – which doesn't have them ever travelling in a balloon). The idea of actually going somewhere in a balloon is also exotic, namely because people don't actually do it all that much anymore (though I do see hot air balloons floating above Melbourne early in the morning). Even when the balloon was first developed as a form of transport it was not necessarily any faster that travelling by foot. In fact I suspect that it was much slower, and also much less controllable. Okay, they also developed the Zeppelin, but they have engines and propellers for motion, balloons just go up, and then go down. That is why they used balloons in world war I.
Well, here is another book that I have managed to write four paragraphs without actually saying anything about the content of the book. That is simply because I cannot actually remember any of the content, and I have no intention of crawling through secondhand bookshops in an attempt to find a copy so I can read it. I have already done that with the Fighting Fantasy books, but that was because the Fighting Fantasy books represented a further evolution in gamebooks (and I already have some on my bookshelf), these books simply gave you the ability to make choices.… (meer)