Review by New York Times Review
ANGELA CARTER, in a letter to Robert Coo ver, once wrote: "I really do believe that a fiction absolutely self-conscious of itself as a different form of human experience than reality (that is, not a logbook of events) can help to transform reality itself." Carter's observation struck me while I was reading Helen Oyeyemi's transcendent first collection of stories, "What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours," where the cabinet of wonders includes Little Red Riding Hood reborn, with an unlikely entity assuming the role of the girl in red, in "Dornicka and the St. Martin's Day Goose." Meanwhile, "Is Your Blood as Red as This?" contains an echo of "Pinocchio," and the opening story commences with the phrase "Once upon a time." The pleasurable awareness of a story being told courses through the collection like electricity, down to the knowing quality of a title like "If a Book Is Locked There's Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think." The cabinet also boasts a young woman who inherits a library; an organization called the Homely Wench Society; a clinic skilled in plunging customers into "drug-induced and-maintained deep sleep" for the purpose of weight loss; office employees who wear gloves indoors to avoid incriminating fingerprints; a fretful ghost. In one of the most gripping entries, the lightly speculative "Presence," a couple, as a result of an experiment, hallucinate a son who never existed: "The next time she went into the kitchen there was a boy sitting at the table eating toast. Twelve years old, maybe 12 ½. He looked like Jacob and he looked like Jill, and he had mad scientist hair that looked to be his own invention. She had to quickly pop back to the 15th century to find a word for how beautiful he was. The boy was makeless." Oyeyemi so expertly melds the everyday, the fantastic and the eternal, we have to ask if the line between "real" and "unreal" is murkier than we imagined - or to what extent a line exists at all. Oyeyemi has written five novels, including the acclaimed "Boy, Snow, Bird," a recasting of "Snow White," though to categorize any of her work simply as "fairy-tale retellings" would be reductive. After all, the landscape of the tale lets a writer use familiar mythologies to question past realities and create different ones altogether - to locate new ways to "transform reality itself." Keys figure prominently in this collection, as the stories explore how the opening and closing of secrets and histories and hearts can liberate and bind. In some instances, one character's tale unlocks that of another, as with "Books and Roses," in which two women with mysterious histories converge. Oyeyemi's worlds tend toward the expansive - robust casts of characters, elaborate plots that unspool gradually, making way for digressions and asides - and the lock-and-key theme is further reflected in the way the stories spiral nimbly toward their conclusions. Some turns open new dimensions of ambiguity; others offer the satisfaction of narrative pieces sliding into place. In "'Sorry' Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea," a character minding the House of Locks observes, "Every time I go into that bloody house there's the risk of coming out crazy." The deeper one descends into the fabulist warrens of these stories, the more mystery and menace abound, and with each story I had the delightful and rare experience of being utterly surprised. A collection is, by my lights, a chance to build a universe, an overarching ecosystem. But it's common enough to encounter a hodgepodge instead, where flashes of brilliance are undercut by clunkers. While "What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours" is linked loosely by keys (and also by character - a figure in the wings of one story might take center stage in another, a structure that recalls Yoko Ogawa's devastating "Revenge"), the collection is even more urgently united by the author's playful, inventive sensibility. Oyeyemi has created a universe that dazzles and wounds. LAURA VAN DEN BERG is the author of two story collections, most recently "The Isle of Youth." Her debut novel, "Find Me," was published last year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 28, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Oyeyemi, who penned the magical novels Mr. Fox (2011) and Boy Snow Bird (2014), offers an equally imaginative set of nine short stories. Lovers populate the pages of these fable-like tales, pining passionately as their quest for a beloved takes them on bewitching journeys. For Radha in is your blood as red as this?, it means enrolling in a puppetry school in pursuit of Myrna, the beautiful instructor who catches her eye at a party. Myrna puts Radha off by choosing another student as her apprentice, but Radha is not to be deterred as she studies under another instructor and is given a puppet who used to be a live woman. In books and roses, Montse, a laundress who was left at a chapel as a baby and raised by monks, learns about her mother's passionate love affair with a wealthy recluse as she herself falls in love with a painter haunted by her own lost love. And love turns to loathing when a teenager's pop star idol brutalizes a prostitute in sorry' doesn't sweeten her tea. A beguiling collection.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In her first story collection, Oyeyemi (Boy, Snow, Bird) conjures present-day Europe, made enticingly strange by undercurrents of magic, and populated by ghosts, sentient puppets, and possible witches alongside middle-aged psychiatrists, tyrants, and feminist undergrads. Loosely linked by a theme of keys and doors, many of the stories feature female protagonists discovering their sexuality or coming into their own. In "'Sorry' Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea," 14-year-old Aisha and Tyche, her father's colleague, send the goddess Hecate to torment teen idol Matyas Füst for beating a prostitute; in "A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society," Aisha's sister, Dayang, is a member of a women's society at Cambridge University, waging a good-natured war against the Bettencourt Society, a rival all-male club. "Drownings" is an allegorical tale set in a dictatorship where citizens are "drowned in the gray marshlands deep in the heart of the country." "Dornicka and the St. Martin's Day Goose" is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, draw on Eastern European history and lore. And in "Presence," a married couple in London undergo a pharmaceutical trial causing them to hallucinate a son they never had, a "makeless" boy. Readers will be drawn to Oyeyemi's contagious enthusiasm for her characters and deep sympathy for their unrequited or thwarted loves. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The words original and unique are thrown around quite often to describe authors, but in the case of Oyeyemi (Boy, Snow, Bird), those adjectives are entirely accurate. In her newest work, a short story collection, these loosely interconnected tales (each has a lock and/or key as one of its elements, and characters from one work may appear in another) beguile listeners while also keeping them slightly off balance. Expectations are met, then thwarted, and the pieces turn in unexpected ways. Characters surprise and, in surprising, delight. Readers Ann Marie Gideon, Piter Marek, and Bahni Turpin bring these incandescent stories to life in entrancing and wonderful ways. -Oyeyemi's singular voice is the key that opens the door to this beautifully imagined and finely wrought collection. VERDICT Recommended most highly to those who love literary fiction.-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn © Copyright 2016. 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.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Keys are central to the short stories in this collection; they can either open or lock away something of significance for the characters. All of the tales are intertwined with themes of search and possible retrieval, which will draw young adult readers into worlds that are sometimes secretive and sometimes elusive; they will be able to easily identify with that search of self that so often comes with adolescence. The characters are relatable to YA readers, from the young woman looking for her long-lost mother and heritage to the hopeful music fan wanting to find the best in a broken artist. These worlds and characters are complex and passionate, and readers will find themselves longing for more once the stories end. Even though the settings are quite strange (a locked library, a city of stopped clocks, a marshland of the drowned), there's a complexity here and the brilliant prose gently pulls readers in, encouraging them to identify with the characters. VERDICT A must-add to libraries, this work will appeal to fans of literary fiction.-April Sanders, Spring Hill College, Mobile, AL © Copyright 2016. 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.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
These nine casually interlocking stories, set in a familiar yet surreal contemporary world, overflow with the cerebral humor and fantastical plots that readers have come to expect from Oyeyemi (Boy Snow Bird, 2014). The opener, "Books and Roses," sets the tone: stories within stories and a fittingly cockeyed view of Gaudi's architecture as two women in Barcelona share their experiences in abandonment while searching for the loved ones who left them behind. Most of the volume takes place in England, with nods toward Eastern Europe. In " 'Sorry' Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea," weight-loss clinician Anton becomes increasingly involved in raising his boyfriend's two adolescent daughters, Aisha and Dayang, while fishsitting for a traveling friend. The story seems straightforward until Anton's friend falls in long-distance love with a mystery woman who's entered his locked house without a key and Anton's co-worker Tyche helps Aisha recover from a crisis in disillusionment by casting a spell from the Greek goddess Hecate. Tyche returns as a student puppeteer in "Is Your Blood as Red as This?," which layers creepy echoes of Pinocchio onto realistically genuine adolescent sexual confusion. Readers realize Tyche's fellow students Radha and Myrna have ended up sexually happy-ever-after when they pop up in "Presence" to lend their shared apartment to a psychologist so she and her grief-counselor husband can carry out the ironically eponymous science-fiction experiment that forces the psychologist to accept the absences in her life. While Aisha appears as a filmmaker employing puppets in "Freddy Barrandov ChecksIn?," Dayang stars as ingnue in "A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society," a post-feminist romantic comedy about warring men's and women's societies at Cambridge. Several stories are pure fairy tale, like "Dornicka and the St. Martin's Day Goose," a twisted take on "Little Red Riding Hood," and "Drownings," in which good intentions defeat a murderous tyrant. For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations, Oyeyemi's stories are often cheerfully sentimental. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
