The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager is quite unlike any book I've read before. The story of Hansel and Gretel is told at 75 year intervals between the years 1378 - 2365 to coincide with the visit of Halley's Comet. I had no idea how the author was going to achieve 14 different narratives, the juxtaposition of historical fiction and science fiction, and all in a non linear fashion without losing the reader's focus or attention. It sounded too ambitious but I was game.

At the time I chose to pick this up, I was reading The Brothers Grimm: 101 Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm and struggling to push through the style of writing. It was for this reason that the inclusion of the Grimm brothers in the 1835 timeline of The Archive of Alternate Endings was a welcome surprise.

"The task set before them is to solicit from the women the tales that have defined their country and culture, the tales that are going extinct. The women know the stories best, for they are the primary narrators. These are women for whom work means labor: tending garden, cooking dinner, raising children, cleaning house. Telling tales, the women inform Jacob and Wilhelm, helps to pass the time." Page 12

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm listen to the story of Hansel and Gretel, and one particular version is different to the one we all know. From this point, we follow the various iterations of the fairytale in the subsequent narratives.

"Hansel and Gretel. The story is first told by tongues now long gone. It echoes through the countryside, travels great distances and across the ages. Families install it into the brains of their children and those children grow to become adults. The story is mapped into the mind like a digital blueprint. The brain computes that the story is about strife, abandonment, the possibilities of leaving bits of yourself behind in order to find your way home. Home is used here figuratively, meaning that which is familiar and comfortable and safe." Page 67

In the 1910 timeline, the narrator is an illustrator of the story providing a neat connection, and here she reflects on the difference between being a writer and reading:

"She is grateful she is not a writer, for writing is a ghostly, haunted thing. It permits one to enter different temporal dimensions. It allows one to enter different human psyches. It requires one to manipulate the feelings of another until one elicits a particular response. To read is to consume, to put the book on the tongue and push it down the throat. She reads the story again and again, silently. She catches herself in the glass of the window and for a moment, she does not know the lips that mouth the words." Page 50

You might be wondering how the reader could possibly navigate and keep track of 14 time lines, and I marvelled at this while reading too. The feat is achieved with ingenious chapter headings and sub-headings, aided by short punchy chapters and vignettes and held together with solid storytelling to connect the timelines and keep the story straight.

"It is easy to forget, but stories need not always have a purpose. We are quick to say that folktales have a moral or a lesson or a creed. But most of the stories that have survived the ages are told for one purpose only, and that purpose is to say this: 'Being human is difficult. Here is some evidence.' " Page 94-95

I think the same can be said when considering the purpose behind The Archive of Alternate Endings. There are morals and lessons along the way and the book is full of cosmic correlations and themes of sibling connections, parenthood, queerness, grief, climate change, AIDs epidemic and the power of stories coalesce into a literary offering quite unlike my usual reading fare.

Somehow the author has pulled off quite a feat bringing more than 14 dates and narratives together and the following quote seems a fitting description of the reader's experience on the page:

"Time feels like it is pleating, so that before and after seem somehow simultaneously now." Page 84

This characterises my own reading experience and I was impressed by the author's ability to pleat time and not lose me in the folds of her many intersecting and overlapping narratives in the process. The only reason this book isn't getting the full 5 star treatment, is that several future dated chapters didn't hit the mark for me.

The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager was published in 2019, and a quick check tells me the author hasn't released any novels since then but I bet she's penning another stellar literary experiment and I'm totally here for it. ( )

I have no recollection on how this ended up on my radar, but I can guarantee I didn't know what I was getting into. This is a short novella, it has a non-linear timeline, it consists of vignettes that are loosely connected to each other, and it plays with different narrative styles. These are all things I usually dislike in books, but for some unfathomable reason they really worked for me here.

I really liked the writing, but more than anything, this had some really big themes that were handled through the Hansel and Gretel folktale. Stories about sibling bonds are always hard hitting, and the role stories play in history is really fascinating. But more than that, the one big theme here that hit me in the feels was the 1980's AIDS crisis and how families just abandoned their sons and brothers, as did the government.

I very rarely get emotionally invested in books this short, but the author's use of language was just so effective. So good. ( )

I gave up on this book about halfway through it. I couldn't follow it, couldn't understand it, grew frustrated that I was missing whatever it was the author was trying to say, or show. I was willing to give it a chance -- it seemed like it would be an interesting book -- but in the end I just couldn't appreciate it. ( )

We've all read fairy tales. In fact, there's an accepted, most common version of the fairy tales we know today, versions that are most likely aggregates of the various once oral versions. The Grimm brothers, in collecting the stories they did, determined how we know them (at least until Disney sanitized them) today. How did they choose which versions to tell? Were there variants they left out, ignored? Lindsey Drager, in her ambitious and unconventional novel The Archive of Alternate Endings, delves into the story of Hansel and Gretel, what the Grimms chose to include and exclude, and how this deceptively simple tale continues to inform stories throughout centuries, checking in every 75 years or so by riding the tail of Halley's Comet through time.

Braiding the narratives of different people from 1378 to 2365, Drager repeats the themes of homosexuality, siblings, love, and the power of story--who tells them and how their choices shape not just the stories but the ideas of the people who hear them. The narrative spans a thousand years from ancient times into the future and then loops back on itself. Like Hansel and Gretel in the woods, the reader follows a path into the story and just when they think they are lost, Drager leaves clues to lead them back to understanding. Images are repeated from century to century, telling to telling, linking the stories, spiraling out from the central tale of Hansel and Gretel and the variant the Grimms chose not to tell as much as the one they did. This is a quick read but not an easy one because the unconventional narrative feels unmoored and unconnected in the beginning, only coming into tight clarity as the story progresses. Those who are not wedded to a traditional novel and want to push their understanding of story will find much to work through here. ( )