Ryan North’s To Be or Not to Be is an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is also a CYOA (choose your own adventure) book, but not the trademarked version of that. North’s publishers call it a “Chooseable-Path Adventure.” It is not North’s first Chooseable-Path Adventure adaptation. It is my second read of a Hamlet adaptation. (I have already read the third of the six book adaptations I have on my shelves.) It can’t be my favorite because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is going to be impossible to beat, but I found myself really enjoying this book, as well as appreciating it. Did it make me think very deeply about Hamlet? Nope. Not really. Did it help me understand the plot? Yes, it did.

Synopsis: There is not going to be a real synopsis of this book since it can end something like seventy or eighty different ways. And you are hopefully already familiar with the synopsis of Hamlet, anyhow. (Prince comes home and Dad is dead, uncle on throne and married to Mom. Lots of politics, self-exploration, gloom and violent death ensue. Also, he gives a moving soliloquy holding a skull.) And there are I-have-no-idea-how-many different ways to work toward the various endings. Mostly the synopsis would be the author playing with Hamlet and messing with Shakespeare, poking lots of satirical fun at misogyny and bad decision-making. It is funny, but in that snickering way. And if you want to follow Hamlet’s path as it is in the original, you can do that by following the skulls. And it will be the plot as you know it, but with a giant tongue in a loose cheek.

Honestly, I don’t know if there is much else to say. If you liked the old CYOAs and Shakespeare, go for it. If you are looking for a fun way to study Hamlet, go for it. If you enjoy Renaissance times and are curious about this amalgamation, go for it. Just go for it.

I am not actually a big CYOA girl. I enjoyed them in elementary school, but now I am torn. It is fun to choose, but I have this weird fomo thing going on after I choose. And I also didn’t want to get all these other versions of Hamlet mixed up in my head, so I stuck mainly to the skulls. The best way to read this would be to read it “through” twice or more, trying two very different strategies. Maybe follow the skulls, but then have fun and do it your way the second time through.

Note: to keep track of where you are in a CYOA, you have to have a bookmark strategy. You need a bookmark, of course, but then you also need to actually mark where on the page you are or you’re going to get off your path and really frustrated, unable to backtrack and figure it out. I suggest a discrete pencil-marking that you can erase if it is a library book.

Another note: I was confused and kinda put-off by the illustrations until I realized what they are; they are the endings of each of the paths (which means they do not coincide with anything around them) and they are also done by a number of different graphic novel (etc.) illustrators. The artist biographies are in the back.

Ryan North is one of those comedic writers that are hard to pigeon-hole. His website is funny, so you might as well check it out if you are curious about him. Some of his works (which together have won and been nominated for a slew of awards and generally have superb ratings on Goodreads):

• The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl series (comics)
• Slaughterhouse-Five: A Graphic Novel Adaptation (graphic novel adaptation of Vonnegut)
• Adventure Time vols. 1 and 2 (graphic novels)
• How to Invent Everything (time traveler survival guide)
• Romeo and/or Juliet (another chooseable-path adventure adaptation from Shakespeare)