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 even know who was who until I got to around page 30 or 40 or something like that. I stopped paying attention. I think once again that Oyeyemi was trying to play around with too many genres and none of them worked. This book has magical realism, Gothic, and even some horror elements. Usually that would be right up my alley. However, everything was so muddled. The only good thing I can say about this book is that it is only 230 pages. 

"White is for Witching" follows the Silver family. The family moves to Dover, England and turns the home into a bed and breakfast. The house though has something wrong with it that appears to be affecting women. That is pretty much what I got from reading this book. A haunted house book should be straight forward, but then again I read 77 Shadow Street a few years back and that book was a mess too. 

There are a couple of characters in this story. I think that Miranda is the sister, but is often referred to as Miri by her brother whose name was Eliot. I think that the beginning rhyme we get in the beginning is the clue to the whole book, but at first I went, what?

"Miranda Silver is in Dover, in the ground beneath her mother's house. 

Her throat is blocked with apple

(to stop her speaking words that may betray her)

her ears are filled with earth

(to keep her from hearing sounds that will confuse her)

her eyes are closed, but

her heart thrums hard like hummingbird wings." 

 

So there's that and from there you have the book jump around to the narrator again telling you about their father called Luc and then how he met Lily. There are other people referenced in this story and I am too tired to go back to look them up. I just didn't get a sense of anyone at all. We know that Miranda has a condition that causes her to want to eat chalk (pica) and she seems to be going in and out of getting help. The book then has us following other women who seemed to be affected by the house the Silver family now lives in. And we honestly don't know if this is true or not (the haunted house being affected by something called a soucouyant) or is Miranda just slowly losing her mind. 

I think the main problem with the writing is that it's very confusing who is speaking at any moment. At one point I thought it was an omnipotent narrator and then I realized who that was and went, oh geez. I finally gave up trying to follow who was talking though. The flow was awful from sentence to sentence honestly. I felt like I needed a diagram to follow along with what was happening at any given moment.

The setting of the book mostly seems to be focused on winter. I think Christmas is referenced at least twice and it seems around that holiday everything goes wonky. Also we have at the end the description of cold winter apples that have white on them that are then made into a pie. Yeah guys, I don't know. This book was something I would have been forced to read in high school for my English class and I would have been asked a question about symbolism. 

The ending was weird and no I don't know what the shoes, the number three, etc. has to do with anything. There were apples, pie, it was winter, I was nonplussed. 

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 on and then just gave up and kept hoping that things made more sense as I went along. They did not. I think the shifting timelines didn't help matters either since then I would go wait what is happening now. I think there needed to be more written cues about what was going on and what time period we were in. I am now wondering about reading her other book I picked for Halloween Bingo this year.

"Gingerbread" is a retelling of Hansel and Gretel. The story follows Harriet who is quite gifted at making gingerbread. In fact, her daughter Perdita loved her gingerbread so much it almost killed her when she refused anything except for that. It also happens that other people feel differently when they eat Harriet's gingerbread too. After Perdita does something (no spoilers), Harriet decides to tell her daughter about her homeland (a fictional place called Druhastrana) and the traditions that the country had and her memories of the people she met. We also have Harriet's mother, Margot in the mix and we hear a lot about Harriet's grandmother and her power to make gingerbread.

I never got a handle on characters. Sorry. I wish I could say I even liked or hated the characters. Instead I felt indifferent. I never got a connection to anyone. I did think the story-line about Perdita being bullied was interesting, there was too much other stuff going on for me to really care. 

The secondary characters were all over the place. We keep reading references to Harriet's childhood friend Gretel Kercheval, but it's so long before we get scenes with these two and then I was let down. 

The writing felt very choppy to me. Another reviewer said that the book feels off when we go back to Harriet's youth and it does. I felt so confused and thought that Oyeyemi trying to tell this as one long bedtime story didn't work. Probably because we pop back and forth into the present here and there. Also, the way that people spoke to each other didn't seem authentic at all and the whole book needed a tighter edit. The flow was bad too. I can't say anything more than that. Everything started to feel like a struggle and I wanted to finish the book as soon as possible. 

I think in the end that if we had only had a light sprinkling of magical realism with the story focused on the fairy tale slightly it would have worked much better. 

That ending was a mess. I maybe went well that was a total waste of my time. I am only giving this book two stars because there were flashes of something great here and there, but just felt letdown in the end. 

Hmm this is a bit weird. Not offputting. Just weird. Don’t know if I like it. 

This also fits the Magical Realism, A Grimm Tale, and Diverse Voices square.