Choose your own adventure with Persil

Who remembers Choose your own Adventure books from when they were younger? They were a series of children’s stories that had a choice of different plot twists at the end of each chapter. The page you turned to and the storyline the book took depended on the choice you made, and each chapter lead you deeper and deeper into a tale you were effectively writing yourself. Being a very curious child, I always used to ‘cheat’ by flipping ahead to see what the best choice would be – but this was all part of the fun.

I thought of these for the first time in years when Persil got in touch about a range of free children’s books…with a twist. The books are all online, interactive, and designed to place your child – in both name and character format – directly into the story.

There’s four books in Persil’s series, and they were written by award-winning children’s author and comedian Adam Perrott, with illustrations by Clare Elsom. The theme of the books is ‘be mighty’, so each of the four stories is incredibly positive and focusses on facing up to challenges that children often encounter growing up.

As they’re online, the books are partly animated – the character swings on a rope from one page to another, a digital clock ticks and so on – and this really adds to the story. Eliza, who is already a big fan of the iPad, was fascinated.

What does everyone think of the idea of online books? We will always love reading physical books and ones like The Tiger who came to Tea are still firm favourites. But storytelling is as old as time itself, and the method by which it is recorded and recited has evolved over the years – so why shouldn’t it be given a modern twist?

The books were created to mark the launch of a new formulation of Persil, which we were sent to try (it was great; as I said here, the washing machine is my best friend). You can also follow Persil on Facebook and Twitter.

Linking up with Fritha’s lovely reading linky: