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. 

Miranda Silver is in Dover, in the ground beneath her mother’s house.
Her throat is blocked with a slice of 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.
Does she remember me at all I miss her I miss the way her eyes are the same shade of grey no matter the strength or weakness of the light I miss the taste of her I
see her in my sleep, a star planted seed-deep, her arms outstretched, her fists clenched, her black dress clinging to her like mud.
She chose this as the only way to fight the soucouyant.

With an opening like that, I couldn't help but be sucked into the book and it kept the weirdness and chills going for quite a while, and I was never sure what was real and what was imagined. There are some genuinely scary moments, and the whole feel of the book is very unsettling. This feeling is heightened by the multiple narrators whose voices switch mid-sentence with no warning. I was reminded of The Yellow Wallpaper and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but unlike those books, this one ultimately fizzled out.

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 enigmatic mysteries.

Miranda can’t come in today Miranda has a condition called pica she has eaten a great deal of chalk—she really can’t help herself—she has been very ill—Miranda has pica she can’t come in today, she is stretched out inside a wall she is feasting on plaster she has pica try again:

To me, the house (and any real or imagined non-human inhabitants) is the sun with Miranda being Mercury, her twin brother Eliot as Venus, and their father Earth. Secondary characters such as a friend Miranda makes at college called Ore would be a moon of Mercury and the housemaid Sade could be a comet. This is an odd way to place the characters but I don't want to spoil too much of the story but still give an idea of the story's placement of characters.

The way this story is written and structured is different, povs from mainly Miranda, Eliot, and the house (yes, the house has a pov), flow in and out with blips from Sade, Ore, and maybe a couple other minor ones I am forgetting. You need to be on your game to fully understand who is talking but even then, things can get confusing with possible unreliable narrators and not knowing what is real and mental health issues.

The horror of the story is that there is a house that is possibly haunted, maybe by a soucouyant (a witch in Caribbean folklore), maybe by a curse on the female line of a family, and maybe simply a daughter that lost her mother and is spiraling down a mental health destructive hole. This story centers on women, their strengths and weaknesses; Eliot plays a good sized role but he is still clearly on the sidelines along with his father who is ineffectual in his drowning grief for his wife.

They were naked except for corsets laced so tightly that their desiccated bodies dipped in and out like parchment scrolls bound around the middle. They stared at Miranda in numb agony. Padlocks were placed over their parted mouths, boring through the top lip and closing at the bottom. Miranda could see their tongues writhing.

The beginning had me captured with Eliot leading us into the story about how his mother died and how his sister is withering away because she seems only able to eat chalk. From Eliot's point of view it seems more like a mental health issue with occasional povs from the house and Miranda popping in to make you believe in the shiver going up your spine. The middle starts to transition to more of Miranda's point of view, her struggles with her mental health and the house, along with looks at Miranda's female ancestors.

When Miranda leaves the house for a little while is when the story started to lose me a bit. Sade and Ore get added to the story, I thought Ore was too late of an additive and even though she brought an outside look and probably worked to more definitively answer the mental health or truly haunted question, I missed the atmosphere of the house and Eliot with Miranda.

“I’m to go home. The house wants me,” she cried. The moonlight made her look blue. It made her look as if she was dead. She opened my window and sat herself on the ledge; she dangled her bare legs over it. We were four floors up.

I don't know how many have watched the tv series The Leftovers but this story gave me the same kind of feelings. Majorly intriguing start, with questions, mysteries, and interesting characters everywhere, only to maybe out write themselves and end up leaving a lot up in the air in a way that devalues the story.

As far as giving you the heebie jeebies, this will definitely do it, some scenes had me looking hard into dark corners in my house. As far as the characters sticking with me, probably not, as they didn't quite become fully fleshed out to me. I do know I would love to see this made into a limited series, Netflix get on that, the psychomanteum room scenes would be chilling good.

That was the first and last time I’ve heard my own voice.

“I think Poe's quite good, actually. The whole casual horror thing. Like someone standing next to you and screaming their head off and you asking them what the fuck and them stopping for a moment to say 'Oh you know, I'm just afraid of death' and then they keep on with the screaming.”