Experience Pipeline Comes to Young Adult Readers from Casagrande Press March 1, 2008 PRESS RELEASE
Open the new paperback Experience Pipeline (Casagrande Press) and within a few pages you could be dropping down the face of a 20-foot Hawaiian wave or running off into the sunset with an amazing Brazilian bodyboarder. Or, you could die!
It all depends on the toss of a coin, which in this book is the mode for moving from page to page. There are over 300 possible storylines, which all begin when you paddle into the waves at the Pipe Masters contest--the last stop on the professional surfing tour. It's just you--the reader--and your two rivals on the final day of competition. If your coin flip comes up 'heads,' you may end up out-riding your competitor to a champagne drenching victory; if you get 'tails,' you might get pummeled by the whitewater and crash into the coral reef.
Targeting a book to young adults is tricky. The new generation of digital natives is more enamored with playing high-action video games, text-messaging and changing up playlists on their iPods than with reading books. To author Quinn Haber's credit, each plot-twisting chapter is only half a page long, the storylines are gripping and unforeseen, and each read is different from the last. The unlikely format of this book may have just the right elements for short-attention span readers.
Haber, who lives on Oahu, admits his approach is similar to the 1980s' Choose Your Own Adventure series that provided young readers a dozen or so possible endings. In Experience Pipeline, Haber maintains, "I wanted to create a reading adventure that was heart-pounding and full of action and different each time--an experience not unlike surfing Pipeline." He says he was inspired by sci-fi movies like Minority Report and Vanilla Sky, films in which the future is alterable. "I didn't want to bind my reader to one fixed storyline. I wanted to give them the actual random, haphazard scenarios that professional surfers often encounter."
The writer concedes that the Choose Your Own Adventure formula's wild commercial success could bode well for the reception of his alternative book format. "I know that moving from page to page based on a coin toss is a little...different. But, the spirit of youth is one of shirking convention," he says.
His breadth of storylines are equally factual as fantastic. Colliding with your opponent during the competition? Yes, this happens. Wiping out, getting sucked into a coral reef cave, finding a treasure cache of gold in that cave, then winning the contest? That's a pipedream.
Will such an unorthodox approach to young adult fiction win or wipeout at the bookstore? Let's flip a coin and see.
For more information see www.experiencepipeline.com
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