White is for witching

Helen Oyeyemi

Book - 2009

"As a child, Miranda Silver developed pica, a rare eating disorder that causes its victims to consume nonedible substances. The death of her mother when Miranda is sixteen exacerbates her condition; nothing, however, satisfies a strange hunger passed down through the women in her family. And then there's the family house in Dover, England, converted to a bed-and-breakfast by Miranda's father. Dover has long been known for its hostility toward outsiders. But The Silver House manifests a more conscious malice toward strangers, dispatching those visitors it despises. Enraged by the constant stream of foreign staff and guests, the house finally unleashes its most destructive power." -- Book jacket.

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Subjects
Genres
Paranormal fiction
Published
New York : Nan A. Talese/Doubleday c2009.
Language
English
Main Author
Helen Oyeyemi (-)
Edition
1st ed. in the U.S
Item Description
"Published simultaneously in 2009, under the title Pie-kah, in Great Britain by Picador, London."--T.p. verso.
Physical Description
227 p. ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780385526050
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

HELEN OYEYEMI'S eerie third novel features a young woman who has a strange eating disorder and lives with her twin brother and widowed father in a haunted house across the street from a cemetery full of unmarked graves. On the surface, this setup might appear best suited to the young adult fiction market, but Oyeyemi (who was born in Nigeria and educated in England) knows that ghost stories aren't just for kids. And "White Is for Witching" turns out to be a delightfully unconventional coming-of-age story. Miranda - or Miri, as she's called - suffers from pica, a disorder that compels her to eat foreign objects. "She crammed chalk into her mouth," her brother explains. "She hid the packaging at the bottom of her bag and threw it away when we got to school. But then there'd be cramps that twisted her body, pushed her off her seat and lay her on the floor, helplessly pedaling her legs." The novel was published in Britain as "Pie-kah" (the pronunciation of Miri's affliction), a less sensational title that grounds the narrative in the girl's sad psychic state rather than in its supernatural elements. After his wife, who works as a photojournalist, is killed on assignment in Haiti, Miri's father takes sole control of the family's ancestral home in the southeastern coastal town of Dover, which the couple have converted into a bed-and-breakfast. But the house - which has its own spirited personality - has other ideas. It frightens off the hired help and even insists on narrating some of the story. ("One evening she pattered around inside me . . . and she dragged all my windows open, putting her glass down to struggle with the suffer latches. I cried and cried for an hour or so.") Another spectral presence, known as Goodlady, may be a figment of Miri's active imagination. Everything changes when a new housekeeper, a Yoruba woman named Sade who has "tribal marks" scarred on her face and practices juju in the kitchen, isn't scared off. In fact, she stays even when Miri goes away to college and her brother takes up an internship in South Africa. At Cambridge, Miri befriends an African adoptee named Ore, and at that point the novel begins to lose focus. For a while, Ore's story takes center stage. Subplots abound (including attacks against Kosovan refugees and violent happenings at an Immigration Removal Center), but they rarely advance the main plot or refer back to Miri's life in any meaningful way. Throughout, however, the theme of displacement, both cultural and personal, recurs. Miri's illness - the "pie-kah" of the British title - provides a clue as to how the apparently disparate story elements relate. Could it be that England, as a body, is systematically rejecting its foreign population? Perhaps a statement is being made about English xenophobia. What's more likely is that Oyeyemi's story is suffering ever so slightly under the weight of a political agenda. As in Toni Morrison's "Beloved" or Chris Abani's "Song for Night," the supernatural elements of "White Is for Witching" serve to remind the characters - and Oyeyemi's readers - of horrifying historical circumstances. Although she may rely on some too familiar narrative ploys, Oyeyemi clearly appreciates that some crimes (like slavery or genocide or, in this case, institutional racism) are so heinous that the conventions of realist fiction seem woefully inadequate to describe them. She makes us glad to suspend disbelief. Andrew Ervin's first book, "Extraordinary Renditions: 3 Novellas," will be published next year.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review

Oyeyemi's third mystical novel weaves a tale of four generations of women and the house in Dover, England, they've inhabited a vengeful, Gothic edifice that has always rejected strangers. The latest occupants are twins Miranda and Eliot, who were 16 when their mother, Lily, died and when their father, Luc, converted the house into a B&B. Miranda's grief is far far bigger than her. She develops pica, an eating disorder, eschewing her father's cooking and binging on hidden caches of chalk and plastic. After Miranda is discharged from a clinic, Eliot grapples with his brotherly responsibilities, telling Lily's ghost, She won't forget or recover, she is inconsolable. Lily's mentally ill mother and grandmother still inhabit the house each understanding that we absolutely cannot have anyone else. Oyeyemi's style is as engimatic as her plot, with juxtaposition of past and present and abrupt changes in narrator, from third to first person, Eliot to Miranda, Lily to her mother. In all, a challenging read laced with thought-provoking story lines that end, like Miranda's fate, mysteriously.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Oyeyemi delivers her third passionate and unusual book, a neo-gothic tale revolving around Miranda and Eliot Silver, fraternal twins of Haitian descent raised in a British house haunted by generations of afflicted, displaced family members, including their mother. Miranda suffers from pica, an affliction that causes her to eat nonedible items, which is passed down to her via the specters from her childhood that now punctuate her nightmares. As the novel progresses, the increasingly violent nature of this bizarre, insatiable hunger reveals itself to be the ironclad grip of the dead over the living or of mother over daughter. The book is structured around multiple voices-including that of the house itself-that bleed into one another. Appealing from page one, the story, like the house, becomes extremely foreboding, as the house is "storing its collapse" and "can only be as good as" those who inhabit it. The house's protective, selfish voice carries a child's vision of loss: in the absence of a mother, feelings of anger, betrayal and bodily desire replace the sensation of connection. Unconventional, intoxicating and deeply disquieting. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

After Lily Silver is killed on assignment in Haiti, her family is left in her childhood home in Dover, England. While her widower, Luc, throws himself into the running of his bed-and-breakfast, their son, Eliot, stays away from home as much as he can, and their daughter, Miranda, begins to lose herself in her eating disorder. After Miranda returns from a psychiatric clinic, the Silver House begins to haunt her with visions of her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, keeping her close while driving away foreign guests. The house also drives away Miranda's African friend from Cambridge, and Miranda herself disappears into the secret passages of the house. VERDICT Oyeyemi's third novel (after The Opposite House) is eerie and compelling, employing a nonlinear style that features wisps of family history and various unreliable narrators breaking into the text that suit a gothic, ghostly story. Readers who like paranormal tales and family secrets, told in an experimental style, will enjoy this novel.--Amy Ford, St. Mary's Cty. Lib., Lexington Park, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

LUC DUFRESNE is not tall. He is pale and the sun fails on his skin. He used to write restaurant reviews, plying a thesaurus for other facets to the words "juicy" and "rich." He met Lily at a magazine Christmas party; a room set up like a chessboard, at its centre a fir tree gravely decorated with white ribbons and jet globes. They were the only people standing by the tree with both hands in their pockets. For hours Lily addressed Luc as "Mike," to see what he had to say about it. He didn't correct her; neither did he seem charmed, puzzled, or annoyed, reactions Lily had had before. When she finally asked him about it, he said, "I didn't think you were doing it on purpose. But then I didn't think you'd made a mistake. I don't know what I thought. I suppose I thought you were calling me Mike because Mike was my name, if you see what I mean." He wooed his wife with peach tarts he'd learnt from his pastry-maker father. The peaches fused into the dough with their skins intact, bittered and sweetened by burnt sugar. He won his wife with modern jazz clouded with cello and xylophone notes. His fingers are ruined by too close and careless contact with heat; the parts that touch each other when the hand is held out straight and flat, the skin there is stretched, speckled and shiny. Lily had never seen such hands. To her they seemed the most wonderful in all the world. Those hands on her, their strong and broken course over her, his thumbs on her hip bones. One night she said to him, "I love you, do you love me?" She said it as lightly as such a thing can be said without it being a joke. Immediately he replied, "Yes I love you, and you are beautiful," pronouncing his words with a hint of impatience because they had been waiting in him a long time. He seems always to be waiting, his long face quiet, a dark glimmer in his heavy-lidded eyes. Waiting for the mix in the pot or the oven to be ready. Waiting for blame (when, at twelve, Miranda's condition became chronic he thought that somehow he was responsible; he'd let her haunt the kitchen too much, licking spoons. He forgot that he had allowed Eliot to do the same.) Waiting, now, for the day Lily died to be over, but for some reason that day will not stop. Meanwhile he has the bed-and-breakfast to run, he has cooking to oversee, peach tarts to make for the guests who know to ask for them. The peach tarts are work he doesn't yet know how to do without feeling Lily. He has baked two batches of them since she died. Twice it was just him and the cook, the Kurdish woman, in the kitchen and he has bowed his head over his perfectly layered circles of pastry, covered his face and moaned with such appalled, amazed pain, as if he has been opened in a place that he never even knew existed. "Oh," he has said, unable to hold it in. "Oh." Luc is very ugly when he cries; his grief is turned entirely inward and has nothing of the child's appeal for help. The Kurdish woman clicked her tongue and moved her hands and her head; her distress was at his distress and he didn't notice her. The first time he cried like that she tried to touch her fat hand to his, but he said, "Don't--don't," in a voice that shook her. Nobody knew what to say to Luc. His children were closest to knowing, but Miranda was mad and when she saw him those first few weeks after Lily's death, she wasn't sure who he was. Eliot noticed Luc more, as an eye does when something is removed from a picture and the image is reduced to its flaw, the line where the whole is disrupted. I find Luc interesting. He really has no idea what to do now, and because he is not mine I don't care about him. I do, however, take great delight in the power of a push, a false burst of light at the bottom of a cliff, just one little encouragement to the end. Sometimes it seems too easy to toy with him. Other times . . . I Excerpted from White Is for Witching: A Novel by Helen Oyeyemi All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.