by Kyandreia Jones (Author) Gabhor Utomo (Illustrator)
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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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)
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