AXIOM: WORLDS OTHER THAN THIS ONE EXIST

I did not expect this book to remind me of "House of Leaves", of all things. This is is not a horror novel, and it's very much geared towards a younger audience, but it does have that element of bizarre architecture and paratextuality (I just googled that term.) Basically, like in House of Leaves, Tonke Dragt uses the format of texts - books, diaries, footnotes - to tell the story. Starting with the suggestion that she isn't the author, but the discoverer of this book in the full title. Aside from that, she uses footnotes, mirrored scripts, scratched-out sentences and ways to signify different diary authors to enhance the fiction that this is a real diary that relates true events and further the atmosphere of mystery and suspense that makes this book into a real page turner. To be fair, she doesn't use any of these elements to their full potential, the way Danielewski does, which is a real shame. You get a sense that she doesn't really trust herself or the audience to fully engage with the idea that a story can be told by every part of a novel, not just the text beneath the chapter headings. I mean, can you imagine if the first mystery of the diary being dated to the 30th of February wasn't so clearly telegraphed? But that instead it would slowly dawn on the reader that that date does not in fact exist? It would've been so cool. I like to imagine that if this book was written a few decades that Tonke Dragt would have leaned into these things a bit more. She could have used actual different fonts for different authors, keep longer passages of text in mirrored script, actually use the footnotes to add plot points... But considering this book is half a century old, that she's being experimental like this is already pretty damn cool.