I am seriously going to hard pass on future books by Helen Oyeyemi. I don't get them/like them and they feel like too much effort to finish. I should not struggle to understand what the author is trying to convey while reading this much. The writing is just broken sentences and thoughts. I don't eve...
Took me a while to read because this is prose that demands you pay attention and not plow through it. The plot is important (and I haven't really seen a racist haunted house before but it makes so much sense!) but it's not the best part about this book. The horror is deep and matter of fact, and the...
I tried. This book was bonkers (not in a good way) and I started getting bored but pushed through to finish it last night and reward myself with Great British Bake Off. I don't know what to say except that sometimes too much magical realism can ruin a story. I couldn't follow a lot of what was going...
White is for witching, a colour to be worn so that all other colours can enter you, so that you may use them. Creepy, intriguing, mysterious, frustrating, and melancholy, White is for Witching had a very strong start that sagged a bit in the middle and then ultimately puttered out into its own eni...
I was left with mostly confusion about this one. I think that Oyeyemi is a good writer, but since the timelines kept jumping around with Maja's remembrances I could never be sure of things. Towards the end of the book things got more simplified with Maja focusing on her pregnancy, her relationship w...
Spoilers for The Fifth Season below! I wanted to take a look at two books which fall on the literary end of speculative fiction, but which are also very aware of the genre’s conventions and influences. Which is to say, that they are both complex and sophisticated, while remaining very much a part of...
This book is a classic gothic, complete with a creepy racist haunted house, weird familial relationships, ghosts of the past, and unsettling body horror. Written in ever shifting points of view this book isn't always easy to grab onto. Sometimes shifts happen mid-sentence, and although the transitio...
I tore through this book and then took quite some time to attempt to process it. In the end I think the best that I can do is to recommend reading this book. The story could be historical fiction, it could be fantasy, but I think classifying it as one thing is limiting. It starts in 1953 and with...
This was my first Oyeyemi and I LOVED it. It’s an immersive book, full of gorgeous language and unusual but not overly mannered. It’s also about a lot of my favorite themes and things. I will definitely be reading more Oyeyemi.
I’ve been a fan of Helen Oyeyemi since I discovered Mr. Fox a couple of years ago. She has a gift for turning stories inside out so that you can see their guts and ponder how they work, while also dropping bits of truth here and there. That said, her short story collection What is Not Yours is Not Y...
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