Gingerbread

November 1, 2018

Granta Best of Young British Novelists Oyeyemi has a splendid way with fairy tales, from Bluebeard (Mr. Fox) to Snow White (Boy, Snow, Bird), so here gingerbread is a theme (remember "Hansel and Gretel," not to mention the fleet-footed gingerbread man?). Perdita Lee lives with her mother, Harriet, in a seventh-floor walk-up London apartment, where they make gingerbread famed in Harriet's homeland, Druhástrana. Finally, Perdita travels there to find her mother's gingerbread-loving friend Gretel, an ominous influence on Harriet's life.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2019
Like her Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), Oyeyemi's latest is a clever subversion of fairy tale tropes to expose the secrets, entanglements, and estrangements within a family. Harriet Lee lives in England with her teenage daughter, Perdita, but no matter how much gingerbread Harriet makes, she can't seem to win over the haughty parents at her daughter's school. And then Perdita falls victim to what seems like an overdose. When Perdita awakens, she reveals that she was trying to reach Druhastrana, the mythological land of her mother's youth. This inspires Harriet to unspool her own story, telling Perdita about her childhood in a land based on financial inequality, her mother Margot's marriage to a poor farmer, and the family's eventual involvement with the wealthy Kerchevels. That turned Harriet's life upside down, introducing her to the whimsical, magical Gretel and paving the way for her and Margot's move to England. Both a scathing indictment of capitalism and a tribute to the maddeningly inescapable endurance of family bonds, this enchanting tale will resonate with literary fiction lovers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from February 15, 2019
Oyeyemi (What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, 2016, etc.) returns to the land of fairy tales in a novel that riffs on "Hansel and Gretel" without demonstrating much concern for following its well-worn trail of breadcrumbs.Harriet Lee bakes gingerbread that tastes "like eating revenge...with darts of heat, salt, spice, and sulfurous syrup, as if honey was measured out, set ablaze, and trickled through the dough along with the liquefied spoon." When Harriet isn't busy trying to woo the cliquish parents at her daughter's West London school with baked goods, she looks after teenage Perdita, corrects student essays, and comes up with bad puns for future courses. But when Perdita winds up in the hospital after an apparent suicide attempt, Harriet knows she finally owes her daughter the long-avoided truth about her origins. Like Scheherazade, Harriet weaves a long, strange tale about her own childhood, immigrating to London, and sexual encounters with the only two men who could be Perdita's father. "It was like looking at faces printed on banknotes--no, they were a pair of black pre-Raphaelite muses," Harriet reveals. As in her last novel, Boy, Snow, Bird (2014)--based loosely on "Snow White"--Oyeyemi takes the familiar contours of a children's tale and twists it into something completely new, unsettling, and uncanny. There are changelings, mysterious rich benefactors, a country that might not exist, corrupt, capitalist factory owners, and living dolls with forthright opinions. But where Boy, Snow, Bird explores the lifelong effects of abusive parenting on its narrator, this novel gives a loving but "shamelessly unsatisfactory" mother the chance to tell her side of the story. Readers familiar with Oyeyemi's work will not be surprised to learn that her latest plot sets off in one direction and immediately takes a hairpin curve in another (and another, and still another). The effect is heady, surreal, and disarming--you have to be willing to surrender to Oyeyemi's vision and the delicious twists and turns of her prose. Oyeyemi fans will likely be charmed. New readers will wonder what on Earth they've discovered.A strange, shape-shifting novel about the power of making your own family.

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An extraordinary recipe for gingerbread, handed down through generations of Harriet Lee's family, is used as a balm, a token of affection, an apology, and to ingratiate oneself with others. It's also the means by which, with one toxic addition, Harriet's daughter, Perdita, attempts suicide. After she is released from the hospital, Perdita returns home to complete her recovery and regain her ability to communicate. Surrounded by her childhood dolls, who magically speak for her, she asks her mother to tell her how she got there. The bedtime story that follows is a multistranded, meandering tale set in the Czech-like country of Druhistan, blending family history with fairy tales recalling "Hansel and Gretel" and "The Gingerbread Man." Along the way, many secrets are revealed, among which is the true identity of Perdita's father. VERDICT It may require some persistence to keep up with the multiple plot threads, the unusual character names, and the Druhistani lore, but patient readers will be rewarded with a rollicking tale from the wildly inventive Oyeyemi, a Granta Best of Young British Novelists whose Boy, Snow, Bird also demonstrates the author's affinity for folklore. [See Prepub Alert, 10/1/18.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.