I really loved this book. You can play as a game with dice to choose your next move or just decide for yourself. A couple of picture puzzles had me stuck for a while but the clues are there. It was a great adventure and I'm really pleased I read it

Full disclosure: bought this for myself - a full-frown adult - for nostalgia reasons and absolutely straight-up loved it. It harkens back to classic Fighting Fantasy gamebooks but updates the core ideas in neat ways. It features a young protagonist (of never-determined gender) as opposed to a generic fantasy warrior. It also features a number of visual puzzles that nicely break up the flow of the book so it's not all choices and dice-rolling. The main story is a classic tale of a foundling with a magical destiny and isn't going to win any prizes for originality but is a great hook for a choose-your-own-adventure title. If I have one major criticism it's that the dice-based combat is far more frustrating than it needs to be. Do yourself (or your child) a huge favour and save them a lot of agitation by just automatically 'winning' any dice rolls as otherwise it's far too easy to make all the right decisions but still be taken out of the game by poor rolls. On the whole I *hugely* recommend this and would have been *obsessed* with this were I given it when I was a child.