Montgomery published Sugarcane Island to a nice, albeit quiet, response, and he and Packard began to write more stories. “Experiential learning is the most powerful way for kids, or for anyone, to learn something,” Montgomery says. Montgomery, a former high school teacher who saw the educational value in game structure.
Island collected dust until 1975, when Vermont Crossroads Press, a publisher looking for innovative children’s books, picked it up. “The agent said he would be surprised if there were no takers,” Packard recalls. When, in 1969, he passed his finished copy along to a friend of a friend who worked as a William Morris literary agent, the feedback was glowing.
During his commute, he began writing a shipwreck adventure called Sugarcane Island, with multiple storylines that required reader participation. This interactivity was a valuable storytelling device-it both harnessed the kids’ attention and took advantage of their innate creativity-and Packard wondered whether there was a clever way to package it in book form. He soon realized that they enjoyed the stories more when they helped choose the endings. He often told his kids bedtime stories, and whenever he couldn’t figure out how to resolve a story, he asked them to weigh in with options. AN ADVENTUROUS IDEAĪ decade prior, a lawyer named Edward Packard had hit upon an idea. “I understand you’re trying to change the way kids read,” he barked. As she stepped into the cavernous office of Oscar Dystel, Bantam’s president, anxiety struck. But as a junior voice in the company, she had no idea how her higher-ups would respond to such an experimental project. In fact, she hoped to pursue it as a series. There were about 40 possible endings, with some paths leading to glory and others ending in alien invasion, tyrannosaurus attack, and other forms of ruin. Delbourgo hoped to make it her first major acquisition. Every few pages, he or she had to make a critical decision on how to proceed. Instead, the reader was asked to assume the role of the hero. The book was something of an anomaly: It didn’t have a plot or a main character or even a proper ending. It was 1978, and Delbourgo was championing a new children’s title called The Cave of Time. As an unproven assistant editor in her early twenties, Joëlle Delbourgo got an unwelcome message: Her boss at Bantam wanted to see her.
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