The Wandering is definitely a unique reading exprience. It brought be right back to my childhood when I used to read the 'Choose Your Own Scare' books from Goosebumps. I always loved that way of reading, it's like combining my love of reading and gaming into one.

Unfortunately for me, that is where my joy ended with this read. I'm not sure if the story just didn't pull me in, or it's the uncomfortable way of reading it (ebook form is not the right way to read this). I found it difficult to navigate and therefore it took away from my reading experience.I feel I may have enjoyed it a lot more if I had a physical copy.

It is such an interesting premise and I think something I could really enjoy, unfortunately for me it just didn't work out this time around.

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for providing me with a ebook copy of this book in exchange of an honest review.

If you like choosing your own adventure then this book is for you. It is not your usual page by page kind of book, you as the reader are in control of where the main character goes.

With sparkly red dorothy shoes on your feet gifted by the Devil himself, your lover. You can go anywhere in world, on one condition that you keep on wandering and never return home.

The Wandering is a literary fiction choose-your-own-adventure novel, as an Indonesian woman who dreams of travel makes a deal with the devil. You're stuck in a rut in Jakarta, teaching English, when you end up with a demon lover who offers you whatever you want. What you want is an adventure, to travel the world, and you end up with a pair of red shoes and the chance to go anywhere. But with such freedom, what are the best choices to make and the best stories to hear from the strangers you meet along the way?

Going into the novel, I didn't know just how 'choose-your-own-adventure' it was going to be, but the answer is that it properly follows the format, with decision points that lead you off down different routes, mostly taking you to different countries and lives. It's hard to tell how many different ways you can go, as I only took a couple of the different paths, but these offered various options so presumably quite a few (reading it on Kindle meant it was hard to get a sense of even how long it was or could be, and actually the hyperlinks worked nicely to make you more likely to stick to your chosen path). The use of storytelling and the ways different stories can have an impact on you was interesting (there was a nice element where you could go and be reminded of the plots of particular stories if you wanted in the middle of sections), particularly alongside the fact you were aware you were losing other stories by choosing ways to go.

This is an unusual look at global travel and the ways that choices can have a massive impact on your life. If, like me, you find choose-your-own-adventure a bit stressful due to not knowing if you're making the best choice, then actually the novel works well to get across that point, whilst having enough text between decisions to feel like you are getting proper stories. As with the genre in general, it probably needs multiple reads to fully experience it, but it's definitely an interesting exploration of where you can go with narrative.

A sincere thank you to the publisher, author and Netgalley for providing me with an ebook copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This is not my usual genre, I’m more into crime/thriller books and even psychological thrillers too so I am extremely pleased and grateful to them for opening up my mind to something totally different.

This might be the perfect lockdown book - a ‘choose your own adventure’ novel that has you gallivanting around the globe wearing a witch’s old pair of magic red shoes. You, the protagonist, are an English teacher in Jakarta, bored with your mediocrity and claustrophobic without the mobility of wealth. So you seduce the Devil and strike a Faustian deal to escape Jakarta - with the curse that you shall wander like a ‘gentayangan’ (the Indonesian title of this book that ‘refers to ghosts who are neither here, in our world, nor there, in the world of the dead’). This is not the comfortable cosmopolitanism of the global elite, but an unsettling, unsettled rootlessness. The decisions you make will hurtle you across continents, genres, and lovers. Sometimes the chosen trajectory makes you a different person, but often it doesn’t. For all the illusions of freedom, some fates cannot be escaped; some things will always happen, and there are many means to the same end. Recurring icons and plot points pop up across seemingly distinct narratives, and there is the blurry recognition of a dream state. In one narrative a kindly old Dutch woman speaks some Indonesian, and in another she is a kindly old Indonesian woman who speaks some Dutch with a colonial hangover. Within this thrilling and incredibly fun narrative structure lies captivating stories, often weaving in Indonesian folklore and western fairytales (the Mahabharata also gets a mention). Stories often lie nested like Russian dolls (Scheherazade gets a mention too), and with each choice you become increasingly ensnared in other people’s stories - like a marriage to an older, Orientalist professor that lands you in a ‘bourgeois Caucasian cosmology so comfortable as to be almost sterile’. As a reader, you often wonder what your fate would have been if you had made different choices, so it can be surprising to realise how similar many of the endings are - as an alien says in one timeline, ‘you all wish to travel beyond the outer limits, but you continue to draw those limits.’

It is not that the choose-your-own-adventure novels are my to go read, yet I found Intan Paramaditha’s "The Wandering" absolutely enticing, especially the intergration of folktale elements.

In some ways this isn't an unusual novel at all: I mean, the 'choose your own adventure' is an established format, and the motifs that abound are intertexts that link into fairy tales, myths and other popular narratives: the Red Shoes from Hans Christian Anderson via the Moira Shearer ballet film to The Wizard of Oz; the Demon Lover/Fairy Godmother (great juxtaposition!), magic mirrors that show you who you really are (or do they?).

But travelling is a fraught concept these days, bound up with privilege and rights, and set against 'migration' where defining words police who can and can't be seen to be legitimately travelling. Amidst this politicised subtext, there's also the tension between moving forward to turning back, and the options to choose remain with the reader.

I think what I'm saying is that there are interesting contemporary ideas at play here but at the story level, this can be a bit dull to read: very 'told', there's minimal drama and dialogue, and the interest is in the figurative subtext. Clever, for sure, though.