Dungeons & Dragons Endless Quest Book 7: Hero of Washington Square

Book Info

I know I flunked, Dad…but I have to save the world

Bobby McCloskey doesn’t fit in.  He isn’t as sporty as his classmates and his only real friends are the homeless people Pigeon Mary and Bagel Ben who hang out at Washington Square.  When a prospector named Sam Brock shows up, Bobby finds himself thrust into a web of intrigue and mystery.  Sam discovered strange irradiated green diamonds and people are trying to find him.  With his parents going out of town and Bobby having to memorize “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Monday to keep himself from failing, Bobby has some decisions to make and saving his friends could mean danger.

Written by Rose Estes, Dungeons & Dragons Endless Quest Book 7:  Hero of Washington Square is a Choose Your Own Adventure style young adult novel.  Following Dungeons & Dragons Endless Quest Book 6:  Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons, it was the first entry in the “Top Secret” category of the books and features art by Timothy Truman.

Choose Your Own Adventures was pretty prevalent in the 1980s, but with the popularity of the series, Dungeons & Dragons got in on the action.  With the previous entries, Rose Estes stuck with themes similar to Dungeons & Dragons…here, the series begin to branch into more typical Choose Your Own Adventure fodder…and it isn’t one of the best entries.

If you’re going to kill me can I finish my hotdog first?

Like many of the Endless Quest books, the character has a pretty decent moral compass…to a fault, but being a “realistic” Endless Quest book it runs into problems.  When talking about elves and dragons, it doesn’t feel as bad as when Bobby simply doesn’t decide to help his friend and spends the weekend memorizing a poem…or the fact that to save his friends Bobby has to distrust the police and even starts fires with gasoline.  The whimsical nature of the fantasy versions of Endless Quest seem to fit a bit better and feels less problematic.

The mystery itself simply avoid reading around either rescuing Sam or teaming with your friends Mary and Ben to take down the men (and therefor rescuing Sam).  The divergences in the plot are multiple and there are a bit more paths for the “good ending” than possibly in other Endless Quest books.  As much as getting the ending where everyone gets caught that is bad and all ends well is the goal, I like the more ambiguous endings where Bobby is probably going to die a horrible death at the hands of cold-blooded robbers…but without saying that.

Endless Quest books are fun and revisiting them is also fun.  I still find myself reading them with my hands meshed in the pages so I can “backtrack” if I don’t like where the story is going.  With their availability online in PDF format, it is possible to get your hands on most of the titles, but nothing matches the strange texture and size of these books that take you back to childhood.  Dungeons & Dragons Endless Quest Book 7:  Hero of Washington Square is followed by Dungeons & Dragons Endless Quest Book 8:  Villains of Voltumus.