Sea Monkeys, Choose-Your-Own-Adventures, and Books Without Words: Gimmicks in Literature to Honour a Grand Marketing Trick!

They might be a bit before your time, less flash and glamour than the delights of electronics and the internet. But you have to realise, back in the before times when everything was black and white and people went to school on brachiosauruses in winter uphill both ways, things were a bit more boring. You had to try hard to entertain yourselves.

Sea monkeys! Like monkeys, funny little devils they are, but wet!

What a magical experience, you get to create life out of little more than powder and water!

Now, when you realise you are just pouring fish food, a little thing called brine shrimp, into the water, suddenly the glitz and glam vanishes.

This is what we in the business call a marketing gimmick.

What child would want to get brine shrimp? But if we slap on some kooky pictures of these fish-people looking things on the packaging, market it in comics, and give it a fancy name... now we're talking.

It's all a gimmick, a genius, genius gimmick.

Today is "National Sea Monkey Day", another gimmick that sellers use to sell more sea monkeys. I'm mentioning this because the gimmick of my blog is talking about random topics with the loose veneer of it being some obscure "holiday" that nobody knows about because it's all a made up gimmick.

People give gimmicks a bad rap, but sometimes there's nothing better than finding something individual and weird, and just going for it, sticking to the bit. A gimmick can turn something boring and mundane into something exciting and special.

To smoothly and seamlessly transition from talking about sea monkeys to books, you know, the point of a library blog, let's talk gimmicks not in pets/fish food, but in books.

You gosh darned youths these days, always on your vimeo games. Not you of course, you being the reader of this library blog, you're good, but youths in general. Maybe it's because books are too linear, not enough interactivity, things to do. In audio games you can do stuff, lots of different stuff, whereas books... less so. Luckily there is a solution, a way to make books more active. Choose your own adventure books! Flip back and forward through these books, trying to find the best path and make the correct decisions. Good fun.

Romeo and/or Juliet : a chooseable-path adventure / North, Ryan
"What if Romeo never met Juliet? What if Juliet got really buff instead of moping around the castle all day? What if they teamed up to take over Verona with robot suits? You get to decide if there should be romance, epic fight scenes... or robot suits! Choose well, and you may even get to the world's most awkward choose-your-own sex scene." (Adapted from Catalogue)

After having multiple versions of the same story in one book, why not have multiple sides of the same story? Two books for the price of one! That price being free because we are a library. The tête-bêche style of books has both sides of the book be the front side, with what story you read depending on which way you orient the book. And yes, we do use the fancioux French word with letters that have hats, because we are scholarly and pretentious. Tête-bêche means "head-to-tail". Useful information to one-up your friends with.

Replica : Lyra : Gemma / Oliver, Lauren
"Replica is a "flip book" that contains two narratives in one. Turn the book one way and read Lyra's story; turn the book over and upside down and read Gemma's story... Lyra's story begins in the Haven Institute, a clandestine research facility where thousands of replicas, or human models, are born, raised, and observed. After Gemma is nearly abducted by a stranger claiming to know her, she starts to investigate her family's past and discovers her father's mysterious connection to the secretive Haven research facility. Hungry for answers, she travels to Florida, only to stumble upon two replicas and a completely new set of questions." (Adapted from Catalogue)

But why oh why would we ever stop at just two? Why not have even more stories in one book! Thus, the anthology, a collection of shorter stories all gathered in one book. Sometimes anthologies are written by the same person, but often times they are collaborative works between multiple authors, all pitching in their own piece. Some of them even have a theme, something tying all the stories together, such as this one here, sharing the genre between stories.

Hometown haunts : #LoveOzYA horror tales
"One bite of an apple from a family shrine unearths hungry ghosts. An underground dance party during Covid threatens to turn lethal. And on the edge of a coastal rainforest, a grieving sister waits to witness a mysterious 'unravelling'. While some of the stories in this wide-ranging collection are straight-up terrifying rollercoaster rides, others are psychologically rooted in our society's deepest fears and concerns: acceptance and fitting in, love and loss, desire and temptation, and the terror of a world threatened by catastrophic change ... and even collapse." (Adapted from Catalogue)

As nice as different stories are, as nice as connection via thematic thread is, maybe you want short stories more related to each other, more of a single story. This offering here is multiple different perspectives of the same event, all told by different authors. The best of the anthology form and novel form combined. 

Violent ends
"Relates how one boy--who had friends, enjoyed reading, playing saxophone in the band, and had never been in trouble before--became a monster capable of entering his high school with a loaded gun and firing on his classmates, as told from the viewpoints of several victims. Each perspective is written by a different writer of young adult fiction." (Catalogue)

Now onto one of my favourite forms: the epistolary novel! Normally books just have you in one or more character's heads. Why? Are we suddenly psychically stalking someone? Or sometimes we're hearing something that someone told someone. But like who cares. Why not instead do some actual stalking. Epistolary novels are told in documents such as diaries and letters and such that have been collected to tell a story. Now why are we reading these people's stuff....

Don't ask such silly questions.

Where'd you go, Bernadette / Semple, Maria
"Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world." (Adapted from Catalogue)

But maybe you're more into speculative fiction. Illuminae is really fun because it straight up tells you, on the first page, that this book is a collection of files gathered for a specific purpose, but why specifically is unclear. This book also ups the ante in the style of documents, not only including diaries, emails, messages, etc, but  schematics of spaceships, propaganda posters, and worrying writings descending into madness.

Illuminae / Kaufman, Amie (ebook)
"The planet Kerenza is attacked, and Kady and Ezra find themselves on a space fleet fleeing the enemy, while their ship's artificial intelligence system and a deadly plague may be the end of them all." (Catalogue)

Pictures are fun. Some books have pictures in them, not just the ones for little kids. Miss Peregrine's has a very fun gimmick with how the photos effect the story. The photographs are ye olde black and white pictures of mysterious supernatural things, sourced from the real world. Now of course these are all fakes (or are they oooh~~) but they are genuine physical things that existed before this book's creation. These pictures are used to inspire the various mysterious "peculiarities" of the characters, with each picture being used to create a character. You can see an example on the cover of the book: Olive, who is lighter than air.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children / Riggs, Ransom (audiobook, eaudiobook, ebook)
"After a family tragedy, Jacob feels compelled to explore an abandoned orphanage on an island off the coast of Wales, discovering disturbing facts about the children who were kept there." (Catalogue)

Here's another book with "pretty" (read spooky) pictures (photographs) in them. Just for you! Because I'm nice like that.

Asylum / Roux, Madeleine
"Three teens at a summer program for gifted students uncover shocking secrets in the sanatorium-turned-dorm where they're staying--secrets that link them all to the asylum's dark past." (Catalogue)

But maybe that's not enough pictures for you, maybe you want more. This book is made with many lovely lovely pieces in black and white art style. Over half of the pages have art on them. So if all of these tiny little symbols are getting you down, try this:

The invention of Hugo Cabret : a novel in words and pictures / Selznick, Brian
"When twelve-year-old Hugo, an orphan living and repairing clocks within the walls of a Paris train station in 1931, meets a mysterious toyseller and his goddaughter, his undercover life and his biggest secret are jeopardized." (Catalogue)

"Screw this, I am tired of words!" You screech, helpless in your obsession with books. "But I still want to be holding a book and taking in a story!" What a conundrum to be in, you may think. But luckily, this particular artist and author of the weird and wonderful has a story just for you! A book with no words, only pictures!

The arrival / Tan, Shaun
"The Arrival is a graphic novel styled wordless picture book about a migrant family's journey to a new and strange land. A tale of a migrant finding his way in a strange, new city told only through pictures." (Catalogue)

"No wait! I changed my mind! Please give me words back oh mighty librarian, I beg!" What J'Shuall of Jackanapery can giveth, can also be taketh away, but also giveth back as mother said it was your turn with language. And so I give you a twist on the normal novel, a novel in verse. Yeah, poetry is back!

Back in ye olde days, even before ye olde days of black and white, back before we even had the common era, people didn't read. Horrific, I know. So one of the ways people would be entertained is that people would tell stories. One style was epic poetry, like a poem but like a book long. Bull takes us back to those times, telling the classic Greek tale of the Minotaur in a style popular at the time. Why have just words when you can have fancy words.

Bull : a novel / Elliott, David
"A modern twist on the Theseus and Minotaur myth, told in verse. Much like Lin-Manuel Miranda did in Hamilton, New York Times best-selling author David Elliott turns a classic on its head in form and approach, updating the timeless story of Theseus and the Minotaur for a new generation. A rough, rowdy, and darkly comedic young adult retelling in verse, Bull will have readers re-evaluating one of history's most infamous monsters." (Catalogue)

Writing uses letters repeatedly, excepting weird cases like x and z, many letters are always used. When suddenly inabilities appear, like the absence of "O", things get strange, but very fun. The Wonderful [REDACTED] is an example, telling tales where a letter is eradicated, and islanders have t' deal with it.

The wonderful O / Thurber, James
"Relates what happened when an evil sea captain banished the letter O from the island Ooroo." (Catalogue)

We all like books here, no? So what if we had a book inside a book? But not only that, this story revolves around the main character interacting with his world and the world within the book he finds. It's a very meta story about stories, while also being a delightful tale of fantasy.

The neverending story / Ende, Michael (ebook)
"Shy, awkward Bastian is amazed to discover that he has become a character in the mysterious book he is reading and that he has an important mission to fulfill." (Catalogue)

Keeping with the theme of meta stories that think about how we tell tales: The Princess Bride. The book we read isn't actually the "real story" of the Princess Bride, but supposedly a shortening of a larger book. This version is all the "good parts" without any of the boring chaff, with little comments here and there from the storyteller, the supposed "abridger".

The princess bride : an illustrated edition of S. Morgenstern's classic tale of true love and high adventure / Goldman, William (ebook)
"A tale of true love and high adventure, pirates, princesses, giants, miracles, fencing, and a frightening assortment of wild beasts." (Catalogue)