SCMP: Review | The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha puts the reader in charge
The choose-your-own-adventure tale offers enchanting journeys through myth and folk tale, even if the fantastic options available are limited.
South China Morning Post/
Post Magazine
Published: 1:45pm, 7 Nov, 2020
The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha (translated from Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein), Harvill Secker. 4/5 stars
Despite their reader-empowering name, choose-your-own-adventure books are more distinguished by the limits placed on the reader’s choice of path than any broad freedom of literary navigation. At most you will have three or four possible paths, and all are bound to lead to the end. What’s more, even though “you” will be the protagonist, typical second-person narration often sounds closer to a series of commands than to the ideal of you the heroine seizing and shaping the storytelling:
“If you want to report your loss to the police, turn to page 25”; “If you want to start a new life in LA, turn to page 352.”
“This energetic, generous book is playful with genre in the manner of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979. You bound (in these magical red shoes) through Western mythologies from the shoe stories of Cinderella and Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz to Amelie and (you’ll never guess the name) Rumpelstiltskin.”