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1.08k reviews for:
Krótka historia Stowarzyszenia Nieurodziwych Dziewuch i inne opowiadania
Helen Oyeyemi
3.76 AVERAGE
1.08k reviews for:
Krótka historia Stowarzyszenia Nieurodziwych Dziewuch i inne opowiadania
Helen Oyeyemi
3.76 AVERAGE
Loved loved loved this. Great stories, great imagination, great characters. A little magical but it's so believable I was left reeling after each story.
You know how in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, sometimes Alice is delighted by all the nonsense and other times so frustrated by it that she loses her temper? Reading this book is just like that. I wanted to throw the book across the room half the time, and yet I think I liked it. It is impossible to rate. Slippery.
4.5 out of 5.
The highs of this collection are magnificent and the lows are still very good. It's an excellent introduction to Oyeyemi (at least, I think so, as it was my intro to her work) and it captures everything I've been told about her writing in little bite-sized morsels. Morsels may actually be a great word for these stories - because there is something confectionary about them. Not in that they are sweet, necessarily, but in that they are often surprising ("I didn't realize this had raspberry filling!") and that they are crafted with care, hand-made in a way that you don't often think about stories as being. If you're wondering whether or not her work is for you, check out one of the first two stories in the collection - almost doesn't matter which one - and you'll know. Then dive deeper and you'll be assured.
More soon.
The highs of this collection are magnificent and the lows are still very good. It's an excellent introduction to Oyeyemi (at least, I think so, as it was my intro to her work) and it captures everything I've been told about her writing in little bite-sized morsels. Morsels may actually be a great word for these stories - because there is something confectionary about them. Not in that they are sweet, necessarily, but in that they are often surprising ("I didn't realize this had raspberry filling!") and that they are crafted with care, hand-made in a way that you don't often think about stories as being. If you're wondering whether or not her work is for you, check out one of the first two stories in the collection - almost doesn't matter which one - and you'll know. Then dive deeper and you'll be assured.
More soon.
Oh, I enjoy her books so much! Her subjects are wild and unique, her characters sound... there is drama and whimsy and sadness and beauty. I can't recommend highly enough. The only reason this is four stars out of five is that I feel like I missed some details-- but I bet a quick reread would bump that right up.
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
reflective
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
What if there was a book of short stories ... that were chained?
challenging
dark
funny
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
What a delightfully weird little book. Though it took me a while to get through, I enjoyed this a lot more than when I read Gingerbread recently. Oyeyemi takes the most mundane things and turns them into creepy, strange, sometimes almost sci-fi fairytales and I’m definitely a fan of hers now.
Magical realism at its best. This book definitely demands multiple reads. I liked some of the stories better than others, but such is the nature of a short story collection.
Lightning! Helen Oyeyemi's stories are dashing, romantic, mysterious, bizarre--
Her work is very non linear; most of the time I get to the end of a story and have no clue what just happened, but my mind is thrumming with the excitement of her wild, dreamlike creativity and imagery--
A possessed demon puppet who splits their headphones with a haunted Marionette on their bus ride home-
-a locked diary with Violet letters that envelopes anyone who dares look inside-
-a scarlet and wine colored hotel whose guests can never leave-
Her work is very non linear; most of the time I get to the end of a story and have no clue what just happened, but my mind is thrumming with the excitement of her wild, dreamlike creativity and imagery--
A possessed demon puppet who splits their headphones with a haunted Marionette on their bus ride home-
-a locked diary with Violet letters that envelopes anyone who dares look inside-
-a scarlet and wine colored hotel whose guests can never leave-
The stories in Helen Oyeyemi's What is Not Yours is Not Yours are connected by the recurring motif of keys and also by a few recurring characters. Many of them have fabulist elements, which is something I'm always drawn to in short stories, and they often contain stories within stories that don't seem to relate to each other at first but then blend beautifully by the end. My favorites in the collection were "'sorry' doesn't sweeten her tea," about a man trying to help his stepdaughter deal with the revelation that her musical crush is facing a MeToo allegation, and "is your blood as red as this?" about aspiring puppeteers and their very strange puppets. Although Oyeyemi's writing is consistently great throughout, some of the stories grabbed me much more than others.