The Library

(this review is a translation from Bulgarian)
(original review can be found here)

The new school year is already here, and we at the Library want to welcome all first-graders! We wish them a lot of enjoyable moments at school, fabulous friends and terrific teachers to make learning fun for everyone! We also sympathize with them: the time of carefree play from morning to night will hardly ever come back ... at least not until next summer. ;) To make up for that, we offer something that will keep kids amused also during the colder, not-so-cool months. If you want to join us on an adventure with all sorts of curious characters and a hungry gremlin, read on. If not, go to the next paragraph, and you’ll change your mind. :)
 

The Big Adventure of the Little Gremlin is a gametale created especially for the youngest adventurers! You surely remember gamebooks from your childhood, right? What I remember is frequently filching my older brother’s gamebooks to read them; and since they were mostly whodunits, I was afraid of messing up, so I would first read a branch and if things got tough there, choose another one.
 

Nikola Raykov, however, has written a fairytale, about a little gremlin facing a great problem: how to find food for the winter. Gremmy the gremlin has several routes to choose from: towards The Enchanted Forest, The Big Mountain, The Dark Cave, or The Deep River. Each of them offers quaint characters and unexpected challenges. There’re lots of ways the tale can go, entirely depending on your child’s choices. A major advantage of the book is that in most cases, the snacks are relatively easy to reach, so there isn’t any danger of your child losing interest or getting confused; at the same time, you can quickly start the game from the beginning and turn it into a completely different story. Each page offers vivid pictures, which help kids visualize the characters and situations encountered by Gremmy, and the writing is amusing and enjoyable.
 

Of course, the book will pique the interest of older readers, too. I for one spent this entire weekend tagging along with Georgi and Petya around an enchanted cottage outside Sofia, bombarding them with questions: Now what should Gremmy do, which pawsie should he listen to, should he follow the running bag, give over his bread, take some advice from his tail, sail along the river, eat the mushrooms, go back...
 

You can browse the book at its website here, and find additional useful bits and curiosities.
 

Happy reading and playing!