Books like Pillars of Pentegarn

Five stars? Yes, five stars of glorious guilty pleasure reading!I was a young kid into Dungeons & Dragons, starting to read books of my own choosing and I was choosing Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books, especially this Endless Quest series, which focused mostly on fantasy sword & sorcery story lines. These books couldn't have been published at a better time for me.The CYOA and D&D connection makes sense. With both of them, the reader of the book or player of the game is in control of his/her own destiny. That's very empowering for children, who are so accustomed to being told what to do they often feel as if their lives are set upon railroad tracks. Usually I give these Endless Quest books two to four stars. Pillars of Pentegarn gets a full five from me for having been the first Endless Quest book I ever read and only my second CYOA overall. This book took me into the world of fantasy adventure, which I'd recently come to love thanks to D&D. (I'm not pictured above, but might as well be. These are prototypical early '80s D&D scenes. Ah the joy of opening the red box on Christmas morning...)In Pillars of Pentegarn you are a young boy from a village. The story begins with you hanging out in the woods with your fox, owl and tree friends. Along come a band of goblins on the trail of adventurers heading for some nearby ruins. Do you warn the adventurers of the coming danger or do you forget about it and head home? Of course you warn them!(I always thought you looked far too happy about having to patch up Owl's wounds in this picture.)After a few pages of exposition, you're ready to start your quest of destroying the Evil One!...or Evil Master!...or Black Master, it really just depends on what Estes decided to call the bad guy on that particular page. Your companions on this quest are a wizard, fighter and thief. The only thing missing to make this the average D&D adventuring party is a cleric (a priest with healing powers), which is one of the reasons this particular book in the series appealed to me more than the others, the fact that it modeled a D&D game closer than any other Endless Quest book I read. As a kid I used to read this thing over and over, even after I'd exhausted all the possible endings. Basically the plot unfolds in four basic ways dependent upon whose manner of questing you choose: the wizard's, thief's, fighter's or your own. For the purposes of this review I went on four adventures, choosing each of the character's paths once. Here are the results:Adventure #1 Taking the path of the wizard (his name's Pentegarn and this was his castle once, btw) I hit the jackpot with the best ending possible! The kid's still got it!Adventure #2 I tried the thief's suggestion and snuck through the dungeon, which proved difficult what with all the wolves, goblins and skellingtons trying to kill us. In the end, only she and I survive. But hey, the bad guy was defeated, so that's a plus. If memory serves though, when taking the thief's path she ends up dead a lot. Adventure #3 Went with the fighter's idea and boldly bashed through, fighting whatever foe dared face us! The fighter was soon dead. And somehow I ended up with the same exact ending as in adventure #2. Adventure #4 Oops! Maybe this is the best possible ending! This time I choose my own path to the Evil One and everything turned out perfectly peachy. It was a strange journey though, almost nonchalant at times. There's one point where the wizard is trying and failing at making our weapons magical and he basically says, "Oh, sorry. Well, the Evil One's in the next room, so let's go." Then I whip out a magic amulet that's only briefly mentioned once before, and without knowing how it works or what it does, I defeat the bad guy. Whatever. I'M #1!!! I'M #1!!!I'd forgotten how fast the choices pop up in this one. You seldom go more than a couple pages before another decision is necessary. There's very few of the long, drawn-out passages of the second book in the series and only a couple of those double-back loops that sometimes mar these books.A quick note on the illustrations. Every EQ book I've seen had two illustrators, one for the color cover and one for the interior b&w drawings. That means the characters often appear different from the cover to the interior, but never has that been so apparent as with this book. Example: The characters on the inside all have iron straight hair and the thief looks like a bit like Kate Blanchett. On the cover everyone's got super wavy perms and the thief looks like a pole dancer from ancient Sparta. Overall this is a light, fun read that may not excite an older reader, but I believe it was written for the early teen crowd and I think it would still hold up as good reading for the 9 to 12 year old set.