As a kid, I was a huge fan of the choose-your-own-adventure-style Give Yourself Goosebumps offshoot of the original Goosebumps series. There was just something so fun about exploring all the different ways you could navigate a single story, even if most of the endings were dreadful.

If you're also intrigued by that idea but aren't too thrilled about handing your little one a bunch of horror stories, then maybe you'll find the STEM-friendly Search for a Giant Squid: Pick Your Path more appealing.

Written by Amy Seto Forrester and illustrated by her brother Andy Chou Musser, Search for a Giant Squid is a bit like an educational video game in book form. You take on the role of a teuthologist — a scientist who specifically studies cephalopods, sometimes from the safety of a submersible (alliteration!) — looking for an elusive giant squid in its native habitat: the ocean's Twilight Zone.

You start by choosing a vehicle, a pilot, and a dive site, and from there you get to navigate your way through an educational deep-sea expedition where every available path leads to a different outcome.

This is one of those books a curious young mind will want to flip through over and over again, choosing different paths each time and always learning something intereseting along the way. It's also the first of what will apparently be a series, with a second book all about fungi planned for release sometime in 2024.

Get the book in these formats:

• Hardcover ($14) ← recommended
• Kindle ($8)
• Apple Books ($8)