White Is for Witching

Helen Oyeyemi is amazing. I don't usually get into spooky stuff, but after reading the Opposite House, I was willing to go wherever she wanted to take me. Her style of writing is poetic without being pretentious or obnoxious. She doesn't take cheap shots at freaking out readers. Instead, this story builds its suspense gradually and gracefully and ends with full force. I'm not very good at writing myself and am afraid I can't do this book justice with this review. It's very good and you should read it.

If you are the sort of person who likes your stories to be straightforward, making perfect sense from beginning to end and capable of being read without the need to really engage the brain, then Helen Oyeyemi's "White is for Witching" is most definitely not for you. If you like chilling but essentially conventional tales of haunted houses and souls possessed, then you are also probably better off looking somewhere else, despite what it says on the cover. If, however, you are looking for writing to challenge your complacency about the way you think the world operates, about what is and what is not; if you are happy to be jolted every now and then, forced to forget about constructing a rational and coherent picture of what is going on, and be made instead to feel your way blindly through events told from multiple perspectives (none of them clear but blurred and distorted, as though through smoky or faceted glass) and if you don't object to an uncomfortable and discomforting ride into new and unfamiliar literary territory, then this book may be just the ticket. Neither Helen Oyeyemi's story-line nor her prose style will be to all tastes, but for those who are prepared to sense their way through her words and their flow, rather than try to follow them exactly, will find themselves falling gradually under their spell. This talented young author weaves an intricate web of the incredible around the prosaic and mundane events of contemporary "civilised" life, blending the surreal and the supernatural almost effortlessly with the everyday, to produce a thoroughly modern Gothic novel of loss, denial, betrayal, deceit, madness, love, desire, possessiveness... and much, much more. None of it is comfortable and at times it can be confusing and disorienting, but who said life -- or literature -- was meant to be easy? The book is not without its flaws: stylistically, some parts come across as experimental and while many of these work and work well, others are less successful. Structurally, there are times too when one feels that the author has simply tried to cram a few too many ideas and issues into too small a framework; there are a couple of plot elements in particular which are left to fizzle out, rather than be resolved or even fully contextualised and which consequently impede and distract from the story rather than contributing to it. These really should have been pruned out by her editors. The book evokes strong resonances of African-based cultures and could probably only have come this effectively from a black author; not that this means that "White is for Witching" is written solely for a black audience -- far from it, in fact; Helen Oyeyemi conjures a rich trans-cultural stew in her cauldron, blending her ingredients with great skill. If you are looking for something out of the ordinary, "White is for Witching" comes highly recommended, although you would be well advised to sample before you buy.

I really enjoyed this book, the style is so lush and yet simultaneously minimal. The character's felt real and the world so surreal and familiar at the same time. I think that this author will have a long and fabulous career, and I will definitely be exploring her other books. Overall a sad, surreal story, that takes elements from fairytales, ghost stories, and drama's about families torn apart by mental illness and death, and wove them all together. Lovely and worth the time.

_White Is for Witching_ blends gothic horror, racial politics, and the older, bloodier sort of fairy tales into a deeply unsettling novel. The story opens with a passage intentionally reminiscent of "Snow White," describing the mysterious imprisonment? disappearance? death? of the heroine, Miranda Silver. From there, we move backward in time, to the point when the events leading to Miranda's fate began. The story is told from several points of view, all of them seeing events from different perspectives, all of them possibly unreliable narrators. Miranda herself, her brother Eliot, her lover Ore, and her ancestral home all have their own versions to tell as the plot unfolds. The house looms as the center of Miranda's tale. Menacing and xenophobic, it desires control over the people it considers its own, and means harm toward those it sees as foreign. The house and its ghosts want to make Miranda a vessel for their hatred. Miranda struggles against the house's domination, a battle that threatens to destroy her mental health and possibly her life. Oyeyemi's prose is haunting and poetic. I hesitate to use the word "beautiful," as that might give a false impression of "pleasantness." Oyeyemi depicts nightmares, not pretty dreams. She has a knack for describing ordinary things in a way that makes them suddenly horrific, and when she describes horrific things, she does it in a subtle, oblique way that feels like you're looking at something so unspeakable that you can only look with your peripheral vision. _White Is for Witching_ works as a novel of the supernatural, and it also works as an allegory. I hesitate to even mention the A-word, for fear of driving away readers who've been burned by preachy authors. Oyeyemi doesn't preach, however. There's a message, but it never overshadows the plot and characters. It's just that you can see an extra dimension to the story if you look through the lens of allegory.

A gifted young writer, Oyeyemi is a master of imagery. This novel is no exception, overflowing with startling images that range from the lush to the disturbing. A small family moves to Dover, where the father fulfills his dream: a bed and breakfast. It is Lily Silver's ancestral home, one animated by its own dark history; Luc Dufresne, Lily's husband, is enchanted all the same. The couple's young twins, Eliot and Miranda, quickly adapt to their new environment, enchanted by the woods and the many-storied house. The particular magic of their twin world is fully realized, the reflection of self in the other, an extraordinary beauty times two. If Luc remains outside the magic circle of wife and children, he does not complain. He cooks marvelous meals while Lily travels, capturing the souls of strangers with her camera. One terrible night when the twins are sixteen, Eliot urges Miranda to remember Lily's every detail, not to fall asleep. That night Lily is killed in Port-Au-Prince. Miranda is bereft. Everything changes, a perfect world distorted by Lily's death. Afflicted with pica, a condition that compels sufferers to ingest the inedible- in her case, chalk- Miranda's disorder accelerates, the girl half in this world, half in another. Eliot bears his own grief and guilt, but as Miri drifts into a dark place that grows larger as her body diminishes, the bindings of twinship unravel. He cannot save Miranda. Oyeyemi's characters are as colorful as the house (charmed or malicious, you decide):Ore, the Nigerian student Miri meets at Cambridge, the girls drawn into an obsessive relationship that shimmers with passion and threat; Sade, the African housekeeper who realizes her juju is insufficient to ward off the spirits in this house; and the hapless Luc, who so desperately wants to save his sad daughter, tempting her with magical concoctions as though food will heal her damaged psyche. For all the elegiac beauty of the author's language, there darkness dwells at the heart of this novel, a relentless, powerful entity, either Miri's Goodlady or Ore's soucouyant, a mythical old woman who eats souls: "Her only interest in other people is consumption". Like a great, greedy goblin, this house, insatiable, savors its secrets: the twins' unsettling gray eyes, Miri's sheaf of black hair and white skin, malevolent whispers that leak from rooms at night, a sunlight-starved netherworld. At the heart of the novel is a scream against the cruelty of fate, any other existence preferable to the loss of Lily, even one that shimmers with malice. For all the magic of Oyeyemi's writing, I am overwhelmed finally by the sadness, the weight of darkness that thrives by extinguishing Miri's light as she slides from transcendent beauty to soulless specter, from fairy tale princess to succubus. Luan Gaines/2009.