Review for Hocus & Pocus: The Legend of Grimm’s Woods
I received this book from Netgalley in exchange of an honest review.
How could I resist this book? The cover looked adorable, and I was very curious about the choose your own adventure part. I can’t think of another graphic novel like this, so I wanted to try it out.
Welcome to a world full of monsters, witches, magic, and more. Meet Hocus and Pocus (or Pocus and Hocus, which was a bit confusing), these two are the top of their class and are going on a quest to find some lost kids. You have to pick one of these characters and follow them on their quest. Help them out, kick some witches butt, find pets (or not), and more. There are mazes to get lost in,
Some parts are one page long, but most of them are just one or two panels.
I have to say that it didn’t work out that well for me. Because this is an ecopy. For instance that chart? I can’t print it out (or even save it anywhere to print it out), so I just tried (and failed) to keep track of things. As for flipping back and forth between pages (and finding the corresponding number) was just not working for me. I think it would work better with a physical copy. Now at times I just lost track of the numbers as they corresponded to panels, and not pages, and yes they were located at the bottom of the pages, but at first I mostly looked at the page numbers on the the program.
I also guess that I just found the most boring route ever to try out as first, as I only found one other pet, which I couldn’t take with me due to apparently not having followed the right lessons (which seemed odd to me given how awesome these kids are with pets and are on their way to become masters), I found only 8 stars. There was also barely any action. I will give it another shot, though I will not keep track of stars, as that is just way too much effort. 😛
So edit, route two. Still following Pocus because she is just the best in my eyes. And my route was slightly longer and more interesting. I gave up on counting the spots on the wolves though, there were too many and some were supertiny and hard to see. So I just disappointed the wolf.
What I would have liked to see was a bad ending, not that everything leads to the same good ending. Every time something happened that wasn’t part of the plan the book just guided you back to the right track. And I think a choose your own adventure books should also have bad endings. Come on, not all quests will go well, I wouldn’t mind getting lost, or being eaten, or enchanted by the witch.
The art is just so much fun, I love and adore the style. The designs on the characters are so cute.
All in all, I still loved reading this even if it didn’t work out and it missed some things. I would recommend it, but not the ecopy, but the normal book.