Books Roundup: Shirl, Blueberries, The Wandering

Remember the feeling you had as a child reading a choose-your-own-adventure novel? Your future felt near, your options seemed endless. In The Wandering: Choose Your Own Red Shoes Adventure, Intan Paramaditha attempts to create this same feeling in adults. Stephen J Epstein translated Paramaditha’s fist work, Apple and Knife, a short story collection reframing traditional fairy tales, and he is back for a second time translating The Wandering from the original Indonesian. Like in her previous work, familiar folktale elements appear throughout: Pacts with the devil, magic mirrors, witches and gnomes, the Wizard of Oz and Rumpelstiltskin. But this is more than a short story collection. Paramaditha uses the choose-your-own-adventure format to ask the reader to reflect on the choices we have, as well as the choices we don’t.