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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | FIC/OYEYEMI | 31480009798726 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | FIC OYEYEMI | 30470000742279 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | FIC/OYEYEMI H | 31479005335996 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Ipswich Public Library | FIC OYEYEMI, HELEN | 32122002058059 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Merrimac Public Library | F OYE | 32125001311437 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | SF OYEYEMI | 31478002882182 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
" Miranda is at home -- homesick, home sick ..."
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.
With distinct originality and grace, and an extraordinary gift for making the fantastic believable, Helen Oyeyemi spins the politics of family and nation into a riveting and unforgettable mystery.
Reviews (5)
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
Guardian Review
Early spring is an odd time for a boom in ghost stories, with Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger and Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Angel's Game already high in the charts. Now there's this supernatural tale by Helen Oyeyemi, who made her name with two novels about ghosts and the gods - both written before she was 25. Anyone who has read those earlier books, The Icarus Girl and The Opposite House , will find themselves in familiar territory, as Oyeyemi revisits a few of their themes: haunted houses, unquiet memories, female insanity, twins, eating disorders. The twins are Eliot and Miranda (or Miri), precocious teenagers who make jokes about heraldic penguins. Their mother, Lily, dies in Haiti, a gunshot victim, and thereafter Eliot watches Miranda descend into a fog of depression and madness. She develops an eating disorder, pica, that makes her want to chew on chalk, pebbles, dirt - anything but food; it also affected her great-grandmother, GrandAnna, who suffered a great loss in the same Devon house many years ago. That house - stay with me, here - is also monitoring Miri's decline, and telling us how it feels. Saturated in GrandAnna's legacy of misery, it blights the lives of the twins' family. At least, that's the basic idea - I think. White Is for Witching is written so elliptically that it can be hard to follow. It opens with four pages of poetic, disjointed writing that makes almost no sense until you have finished the book - which would be fine if the remaining 241 pages swept you off your feet, but the whole novel is sadly unengaging. Part of the problem is that, although Oyeyemi is undoubtedly interested in ghosts, she may not be so interested in ghost stories. Why else would she start her book with Miri - a pale, clever, outsiderish girl who could have stepped straight from an Edward Gorey illustration - already insane? We meet her as she is coming out of a six-month spell in the psychiatric hospital, and she seems on the way to recovery. Surely this breaks one of the first rules of storytelling: things have to get worse before they get better. Has the house worked its mischief before we even came in? As for the ghosts, they barely make an appearance until quite late in the narrative. And even then, one of the most potentially creepy scenes is broken when the doorbell rings and a boy - a real, live, totally unimportant boy - comes in with a bunch of flowers. All this may seem petty. But without a tight structure and a carefully controlled build-up, a suspense story simply cannot function. It may be that Oyeyemi is so intoxicated by words and ideas and the scenes playing out in her head that she is unable to consider her own work objectively. Certainly there are bits of novelese here that shatter any remaining illusion on the part of the reader: "I am very concerned that this will not end well," Miri remarks stiffly at one point. The best part of the book, in fact, is the most ordinary. Miranda goes off to Cambridge and meets a girl called Lind Ore, who conveys the dislocation and alienation she feels on becoming one of the very few black students at the university. This no doubt draws on Oyeyemi's own experience, and Ore's narrative is more interesting and moving than anything that happens to the twins. The language here is simpler and plainer, too, which helps. This is a ghost story without much of a ghost, or a story. And, like a spectre with no one to haunt, it seems destined to fade soundlessly away. Caption: article-carrie.1 Anyone who has read those earlier books, The Icarus Girl and The Opposite House , will find themselves in familiar territory, as [Helen Oyeyemi] revisits a few of their themes: haunted houses, unquiet memories, female insanity, twins, eating disorders. The twins are Eliot and Miranda (or Miri), precocious teenagers who make jokes about heraldic penguins. Their mother, Lily, dies in Haiti, a gunshot victim, and thereafter Eliot watches Miranda descend into a fog of depression and madness. She develops an eating disorder, pica, that makes her want to chew on chalk, pebbles, dirt - anything but food; it also affected her great-grandmother, GrandAnna, who suffered a great loss in the same Devon house many years ago. That house - stay with me, here - is also monitoring Miri's decline, and telling us how it feels. Saturated in GrandAnna's legacy of misery, it blights the lives of the twins' family. At least, that's the basic idea - I think. White Is for Witching is written so elliptically that it can be hard to follow. - Carrie O'Grady.
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
New York Review of Books 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.
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.