James Armistead Lafayette (Choose Your Own Adventure: Spies)

by Kyandreia Jones (Author) Gabhor Utomo (Illustrator)

James Armistead Lafayette (Choose Your Own Adventure: Spies)

Choose Your Own Adventure SPIES: James Armistead Lafayette by Kyandreia Jones takes YOU to the heart of the American Revolutionary War. 9-12 year old readers will enact the life of an actual historic spy, James Armistead Lafayette, whose top secret espionage efforts were instrumental in helping the revolutionary forces defeat the British. And yet his story has been almost entirely left out of history books.

Choose Your Own Adventure SPIES: James Armistead Lafayette is an interactive adventure book in which YOU decide what happens next.

The year is 1781 and George Washington is commanding thousands of troops in Yorktown, Virginia, on the brink of the most important battle of the war. You are James Armistead, a brave and literate enslaved person in Virginia. Marquis de Lafayette, one of Washington s key officers, approaches you with the most critical choice of your life: do you join the Revolutionary army as a top secret spy or find freedom on your own terms? As a spy for the revolution, you might change the course of history, but whose liberty will you really be fighting for?

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ALA/Booklist

History gets a makeover in the new Choose Your Own Adventure Spies series, which plunks readers into exciting scenarios, based on real events, and lets them call the shots...This book will get kids excited about history, but it's imperative that they read the end note on James Armistead Lafayette's life to learn what choices he actually made.

Kirkus

For fans of Choose Your Own Adventure books, this historical drama is worth having on the shelf.

Publishers Weekly

In this history-inspired spin-off from the venerable Choose Your Own Adventure line, readers adopt the persona of James Armistead Lafayette, an enslaved person who becomes a spy during the American Revolution. As typical for the CYOA brand, the plot offers numerous branching points where any one of multiple choices can drastically alter the course of the story and lead to happy endings or dire consequences. Depending on their decisions, readers might meet Gen. George Washington and aid the Revolutionary Army, seek freedom elsewhere, or suffer horrible fates--such as being killed in the line of duty, eaten by wolves, or, in a more fanciful narrative, granted glimpses of the future. With so many different plotlines and endings, the details of Lafayette's actual career are difficult to discern, though a short, appended biography fills in historical facts, as does as a timeline of slavery and emancipation in the U.S. The plots are swift and snappy, and the format, a tried-and-true gimmick that has persisted for decades, lends itself well to multiple rereads and interactivity, if not to a clear historical record. Ages 8-12. (May)

Copyright 2019 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.

Review quotes

 
Classification
Fiction
ISBN-13
9781937133313
Lexile Measure
610
Guided Reading Level
-
Publisher
N/A
Publication date
May 01, 2015
Series
Choose Your Own Adventure: Spies
BISAC categories
JUV011010 - Juvenile Fiction | People & Places | United States - African-American
JUV028000 - Juvenile Fiction | Mysteries, Espionage, & Detective Stories
JUV016120 - Juvenile Fiction | Historical | United States - Colonial & Revolutionary Periods
JUV020000 - Juvenile Fiction | Interactive Adventures
JUV076000 - Juvenile Fiction | Spies & Spying
Library of Congress categories
History
African Americans
United States
Slaves
Historical fiction
Spy stories
Revolution, 1775-1783
Spies
Biographical fiction
Choose-your-own stories
Plot-your-own-stories
Lafayette, James Armistead

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