I'm enjoying North's second Shakespearian choose-your-own-path book, Romeo and/or Juliet, and wanted to read the first one, so I ordered this fair-condition softcover. It's the story of Hamlet, with... some variations...

I love the author's sense of humor, and the choose-your-own-path options are many and varied. The main options are whether you play as Hamlet or as Ophelia, but you can also play Hamlet's father - yeah, he dies early on, but don't let that stop you! - and no matter which one you choose, you may have the option to switch viewpoints down the line. [Sometimes the author gets testy if you adhere too closely to the original story - those choices are marked with Yorick-skull icons, very cute - and "suggests" that you play another character for a bit.]

Each of the endings features a full-page illustration from a different artist, adding fun - and gore! - to the proceedings. And while most of the endings involve your character's death, quite a few are surprisingly upbeat, though in widely-differing ways. (I was fond of the "ghost exploring the bottom of the ocean" one, myself.)

There are even some bonuses for those of us who compulsively try to step through every possible option - due to some kind of hyperspace mishap, a few pages from a completely unrelated story pop up, and you wouldn't see them if you weren't looking for them. But the main choices are loads of fun, whether they lead to abandoning the quest for vengeance and living a satisfying life elsewhere, achieving vengeance promptly (hint: "kill Claudius" is nearly always a good idea, storywise), becoming a pirate (awesome!), or turning into a genocidal maniac.

Oh, and there's a tasty-sounding recipe for stew, although the stew in-story has some less savoury associations (it'll make sense when you get to that bit).

Favorite bits include:

Upon attempting to use a ship's cannon to achieve vengeance, with the options requesting a degree of realism, one is "I am inside a cannon about to be fired at my stepfather because a ghost told me to. Let's not get too hung up on realism right now, okay?"

The "ghost-on-ghost war for the survival of the afterlife, which is "an awesome ending".

The mini-game segment in which you try to escape the tower room in which you are trapped with the corpse of Polonius ("I don't see a chamber here. You have 6 turn(s) remaining.") That one's a nod to the early text-based games of yore, and I loved it.

The expansion of the whole attacked-by-pirates arc into its own plot thread.

The one where your options include several "how did we get to this page" questions, one of which is totally bogus - and leads to a page where the author berates you for lying to a book {wry grin}.

The play-within-the-play, or in this case the choose-your-own-adventure within the choose-your-own-adventure; "The Murder of Gonzago" includes cover-art in the style of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series.

The "training montage".

And much, much more!

[There's a TV Tropes page on the book that's quite entertaining, but do beware of spoilers.]

I plan to leave this book in or near Worthy Burger at around 3 or so; hope the finder enjoys it! [Update: there was a farmers market in the common across the street from the burger place, so I left the book on a bench there.]

*** Released for the 2016 Canada Days release challenge, for its Canadian author. ***