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doyinoyen 's review for:
Gingerbread
by Helen Oyeyemi
How does she do it?
“[Her] trust was so severe that at the very last minute, possibly unsettled by the girl’s refusal to blink first, reality took her side.”
I’m co-opting this quote from Gingerbread to explain what it felt like to read this book (and other Helen Oyeyemi works): She writes with such conviction of her characters and her worlds that I can’t help but get completely sucked in. Dolls that talk. Yep. A girl with four pupils? Okie dokie. A country that may or may not exist? Yeah. A family legacy told in one long bedtime story, full of so many rich side-stories and asides that I forget I’m already reading a story within a story? Give it.
Helen makes the fantastical seem not only possible, but almost guaranteed, and her characters are so sharply defined and her humor so pleasantly surprising that finishing Gingerbread and coming back to reality felt like reverse culture shock after a wonderful trip abroad.
“[Her] trust was so severe that at the very last minute, possibly unsettled by the girl’s refusal to blink first, reality took her side.”
I’m co-opting this quote from Gingerbread to explain what it felt like to read this book (and other Helen Oyeyemi works): She writes with such conviction of her characters and her worlds that I can’t help but get completely sucked in. Dolls that talk. Yep. A girl with four pupils? Okie dokie. A country that may or may not exist? Yeah. A family legacy told in one long bedtime story, full of so many rich side-stories and asides that I forget I’m already reading a story within a story? Give it.
Helen makes the fantastical seem not only possible, but almost guaranteed, and her characters are so sharply defined and her humor so pleasantly surprising that finishing Gingerbread and coming back to reality felt like reverse culture shock after a wonderful trip abroad.