CYOA: #6 Your Code Name Is Jonah by Edward Packard

This was absolutely one of my favorite books in the series as a kid. As the title implies, this is Cold War espionage James Bond spy thriller stuff, and you—as the protagonist—are a special agent, and an adult working for SIG, an organization that Packard seems to have made up. The tone is surprisingly adult as well, including references to specific gun models, helicopter models, some pretty violent moments, and some musing here and there about the morality of patriotism at all cost, or even participating in the espionage business—although luckily not in a shallow hippy type of way. It's deep stuff... even if it only touches on it briefly. As the back cover implies, you may wonder if you can trust your own government to do the right thing, to say nothing of the Soviets. While the Cold War is obviously over, I never felt like having it be a key component of the story made it feel dated. Of course, that might be partly my perspective; having grown up all the way through High School with the Cold War in the backdrop of my life, I just kind of intuitively get it even if circumstances across the world have changed. What has maybe not aged quite as well; or more likely it just always was kind of hoaky to begin with and I only accepted it because I was a little kid, was the idea of chasing down a mysterious new humpback whale song and trying to decode it. The idea that the Americans and the Soviets would make this a brief hotspot in the Cold War to find out... what humpback whales are trying to say? is kinda silly. Packard does give at least a somewhat better explanation than that; the whales go to a secret under-ice cavern that both the Americans and Soviets think would make a great submarine base, but you don't necessarily find that out in every branch. Of course, by having this hinge on whales—and as I mentioned a few reviews or so back, "save the whales!" was definitely what passed for a meme in the pre-internet days of the 80s during my childhood—it introduces a conservationist theme too. This is also handled relatively well; it could have been blunt and Leftist without any nuance; a precursor to the cult-like movement of modern environmentalism. Instead, it isn't—it does recognize the needs of people without dismissing them as irrelevant to the needs of the whales, but searches for a solution that makes everyone happy. For what its worth, in many endings where you aren't killed by KGB agents, or drown in the ocean, the Russians and Americans come together to sign a new treaty where the whales are protected and neither country gets to have a new submarine base smack dab in their habitat. Like I said, the themes and tone, with the exception of the idea of Soviets and Americans fighting over access to whalesong tapes being kind of silly, is surprisingly mature and has aged significantly well as a result. This continues my evaluation and reinforces my conclusion that these early single digit volumes in the series written by Edward Packard in particular are among the most classic titles in the series. Some of the subsequent ones are just as good; like Packard's #14 The Forbidden Castle, or his #16 Survival At Sea, but they also come along with a "been there done that" feel by this time. (Curiously, I feel like Montgomery's classic titles are a bit later in number; his early stuff isn't as good. His first really good one is #13, The Abominable Snowman. Also curiously, for years I had it stuck in my head somehow that Montgomery had written this one, which of course is not correct.) And, of course, by time we start to get to the end of the teens, we start to get some new authors in the stable, like Richard Brightfield and Julius Goodman, who went on to be relatively prolific within the series.

As noted on my snapshot of the cover, the interior artist is—once again—Paul Grainger. In fact, he illustrated all of the books between 1-10, half of the teens, and many of the subsequent volumes as well. He's the most iconic CYOA illustrator, and to me, Paul Grainger illustrations are an important part of the proper "look and feel" of the series... although I recognize that some of the other artists do really good work as well, particularly Ralph Reese. Grainger illustrates the protagonist, as you can see, as an adult man with intense eyes, blond hair, a turtleneck sweater and tweed jacket, and many of the Russian agents are caricaturish thugs and criminals in appearance. There's a lot of interesting "action shots" among the illustrations, and I remember as a kid being particularly interested in finding paths that took me to certain illustrations, like the car falling off a cliff, your protagonist jumping out of an exploding car, the grappling hook snaking up to an attic window, etc. This book has some of Grainger's most exciting work, I think. My copy is a 6th printing from March 1981 and the cover price was $1.50. There are 114 pages, and according to the cover, 27 possible endings. Mine's in pretty good shape, but some of the spines of some of my books (including this one) are faded, and the red is now a pale peachish yellow. There were some printings that changed the trade dress on the spine, and rather than having the big Choose Your Own Adventure banner in a red balloon and a smaller title, they had the title and author in much bigger letters, without the CYOA banner at all. This seems to have only lasted for a brief time, though—my copy of Deadwood City is like that as well as my copy of Mystery of the Maya. My original copy of The Lost Jewels of Nabooti were like that too, but the one I bought to replace my missing original copy is the standard look instead.

We'll see as I do more of these if this still holds out, but for many years I'd say that this is definitely a contender, if not the leading contender, for my favorite book in the series. The serious tone, the action-based choices and the overall intensity of this one make it really quite good. Structurally, Packard hadn't yet settled upon doing the A-story and B-story approach; Jonah feels like there's one story, and you just explore different aspects of it depending on the choices you make, and how successful you are is also contingent upon your choices—but ultimately, there's only one secret of the whalesong, and only one real international outcome that's described. (I take that back; there's at least one detail that can change depending how which branch you're on; the identity of Double-Eye, your KGB rival, can be one of two different people.) You don't, if you make different choices, find out anything different about the whales, for instance. Because there's a single story with many avenues for exploring it, there's a lot of opportunity within the book to make one choice, and after exploring that branch for a bit, finding yourself exploring another branch that you had not chosen after all. This makes the book feel a bit longer, as an individual read-through that doesn't end badly or early might be extended by one of these loops. In fact, for years, I had a "preferred read-through" that I felt really extended it as long as I could hope for and saw some of my favorite illustrations and moments as I went through it, even though it didn't really have the greatest ending; I survived, but then it just kind of stopped with me washed up on a beach, waving to friendly whales, but not having found the whalesong tapes, the missing scientist, the underwater cavern, or otherwise been very successful at my mission. I know that there seem to have been pretty strict limits on pagecount, since all of these books are within a 110-120 or so page limit, but this kind of feels like we just stopped the story rather than finishing it, and I'd have liked to continue on. Some series, including one written by Packard like the Escape From Tenopia books, expanded on this fewer endings and more looping concept to its logical conclusion; they only had only one ending, and the challenge was finding the correct path that will eventually get you there; often with considerable repeat looping, like reading a maze or labyrinth. I'm not suggesting that I wish Your Code Name is Jonah was like this, but I do feel like many of the endings that are really just stops and incompletes would benefit from looping back into another branch that might take you to an actual ending, as opposed to the story just stopping.

One curious thing; there are two typos that I spotted. One of them isn't a big deal; the word computer is missing its first letter. One of them, however, is the page number associated with a choice, and it sends you to page 74 instead of 44 (which is easy enough to figure out if you're exploring all of the branches, because other pages give you the option to go there by making the same decision.) If you don't know that, though, you'll get a very strange and incoherent bad ending, where you're interviewing suspects of a letter theft in the White House and suddenly you're gunned down in a KGB safehouse.

Anyway, as is my style, let's explore the endings that I had while investigating the mystery of the kidnapped whale scientist.

• A Russian agent posing as a British agent gave away my position, and I was stopped from progressing, although unhurt. Mission botched.
• I was in a car wreck and had to recover; I guess I enjoyed some rest while someone else solved the case.
• It turned out that the mission was a test, and I passed it by doing what Obbard, the director, wanted to see me do. The agreement with the Russians happened in the background, and there's no more case to resolve.
• Or... in another ending, I failed the test and was fired.
• I rescued the missing scientist, DuMont, but was shot and killed myself.
• I caught Double-Eye, who was posing as a colleague.
• was killed by Double-eye, who was posing as a colleague.
• I rescued DuMont, took him to the President, and ended up on the news as a hero. Which I'm sure is meant to be a good ending, but seems like it ends my career as a secret agent.
• recovered the whalesong tape from the Russians and broke up the biggest enemy spy ring in the country.
• Got shot and killed when my bluff in the Russian safe house failed. Three separate times, actually.
• escaped a bad situation after rescuing DuMont by swimming away and getting picked up by a lobster boat. But the cold and shock made me sick, and I'm out of the action for weeks.
• me and another scientist tried to hand off a fake whalesong tape to some bad guys and we're shot dead.
• I fired at a bobbing life raft in an attempt to puncture it, but I missed twice. A gunman on the raft made a lucky shot and killed me.
• got run down in the water by a Russian submarine. Curiously, the full-page illustration for this is on the wrong page.
• I went with Obbard to see the President, and convinced him to sign a treaty with the Russians. Yay, me.
• after being kidnapped by Soviet thugs, I was killed for not cooperating.
• quit my job to become a marine biologist. 
• went out to see the whales, had my ship sunk by a Russian sub, but they told me and the Captain that our governments had made a treaty and we'd be returned shortly to America.
• while I was working one angle, the mission was resolved somewhere else and the Soviets and Americans made a treaty around the issue. This happened more than once, and in one, I'm spending two weeks on the beach on an impromptu vacation. I wish that when I met my objectives in my current job I was sent off for two weeks of vacation! Nice perk.
• successfully bluffed my way into the Soviet safehouse, and am credited for breaking up the biggest spy ring in the country. It's unclear if I kept the money that the Soviet agents gave me...
• had several endings where I was stranded out at sea off New England or even the Maritimes. In two of them, whales end up saving me, and in one I even consider quitting my job to work with whales. In another, I drown.

Next up is the classic space exploration adventure The Third Planet From Altair, which was an early favorite of mine, but which I suspect I won't look back on quite as fondly as I did when I was 9-10 years old. #22 Space Patrol is the more iconic space opera title; this one is more of a First Contact mission.