Meanwhile (10th Anniversary Edition): Pick Any Path. 3,856 Story Possibilities (Top Ten Great Graphic Novels for Teens)

This author is an absolute genius. Also much better than the appI defy you to work out all the story-lines.How have I changed history and populated the world with just me?Chocolate ice cream every time!!

Looks fab - thank you

Difficult to follow (even for an adult) and when you finally work it out the 'story' is not really worth the effort. Novelty value only.

Great book merging literary concepts such as follow-your-own-path storylines, memento-like puzzles, and great illustrations on high quality paper. Really happy to have stumbled across this book.

Great

Jason sinha took a simple puzzle game in NY times and turned it into this amazing collage of lifes path way.Book effectively tells you how simple decision at a time effects life as whole.

It begins like a regular comic strip, but depending on your first choice can be over in seconds, or can whirl into a convoluted time-travelling tale of saving the world.I’ve played a lot of gamebooks and choose-your-own-adventure books in my lifetime, but I’ve never encountered anything quite like Meanwhile. The tube system is definitely different, and sometimes the author even creates optical illusions with his art, convincing you that you’ve been re-directed to a page you’ve read before, when in fact you’re just reliving the same scene in a parallel timeline. There are even some orphaned entries that hint at a secret and a little tribute to the CYOA book Inside UFO 54-40.Yes, it’s totally messed up but great fun, and VERY well designed. It almost has a downbeat Twilight Zone feeling to the entire story once you’ve discovered everything.

Other reviews have explained what this book is and how it works, and how physically it's different to other books - and it is physically very, very different - so I'll concentrate on the entertainment value.It has been suggested there are 3,856 story possibilities, but only one of them (or at most a handful) will lead you to the end of the story. This is, I believe, a monumental error. Ultimately it makes what could have been a really interesting experiment in fiction, into a rather tiresome and repetitive bore.It is extremely difficult to get through the first few stages of the story, and it's pretty much impossible to bookmark your path and be able to get back to a particular point you know to be key - the key points are normally many page turns behind you by the time you realise they were key.The fact the author engaged the use of a super-computer and based his narrative on a flowchart doesn't surprise me: as a software developer I can see evidence of what is frustrating to so many people in software design here in a book! The author who is very close to the story and who knows the "right path", has made it nearly impossible for somebody to pick this up and be able to achieve their objective. I believe what we have here is the fiction comic version of a badly designed piece of software.If you're prepared to persevere I am sure it's rewarding, but after an hour I had to put it down with the hope I'd come back and re-visit it when I had forgotten the early stages which I had had to revisit over and over again constantly. I am sure I'll come back to it as an adult fan of interesting fictional devices (and of comics), but I'm not sure I would be willing to just hand this over to a youngster and hope it would keep them engaged or entertained for more than half an hour.It's technically brilliant in many ways, but it needs more paths through it to get to the end objective in an easier way.