Gingerbread

by Helen Oyeyemi

The prize-winning, bestselling author of Boy, Snow, Bird and What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours returns with a bewitching and inventive novel.

Influenced by the mysterious place gingerbread holds in classic children's stories--equal parts wholesome and uncanny, from the tantalizing witch's house in "Hansel and Gretel" to the man-shaped confection who one day decides to run as fast as he can--beloved novelist Helen Oyeyemi invites readers into a delightful tale of a surprising family legacy, in which the inheritance is a recipe.

Perdita Lee may appear to be your average British schoolgirl; Harriet Lee may seem just a working mother trying to penetrate the school social hierarchy; but there are signs that they might not be as normal as they think they are. For one thing, they share a gold-painted, seventh-floor walk-up apartment with some surprisingly verbal vegetation. And then there's the gingerbread they make. Londoners may find themselves able to take or leave it, but it's very popular in Druhástrana, the far-away (and, according to Wikipedia, non-existent) land of Harriet Lee's early youth. In fact, the world's truest lover of the Lee family gingerbread is Harriet's charismatic childhood friend, Gretel Kercheval--a figure who seems to have had a hand in everything (good or bad) that has happened to Harriet since they met.

Decades later, when teenaged Perdita sets out to find her mother's long-lost friend, it prompts a new telling of Harriet's story. As the book follows the Lees through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate, gingerbread seems to be the one thing that reliably holds a constant value. Endlessly surprising and satisfying, written with Helen Oyeyemi's inimitable style and imagination, it is a true feast for the reader.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Audiobook, Literary Fiction, Retellings, Book Club

372 pages, Paperback

First published March 5, 2019

About the author

Helen Oyeyemi is a British novelist. She lives in Prague, and has written eleven books so far, none of which involve ‘magical realism’. Can’t fiction sometimes get extra fictional without being called such names…?

Reviews

[Brooke · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars.

I have a feeling that I’m going to be in the minority when it comes to this book, but I just didn’t get it. I was confused and unsure about what was happening 80% of the time, due shifting timelines, elements of magical realism, the multitude of characters and so on. While I spent the other 20% engaged in Oyeyemi’s wonderful writing, I finished this book without any clear idea of what it was about...

That said, I think this is a case of ‘It’s not you, it’s me” as I’ve come to realize that magical realism just isn’t for me. I’m sure other people will love this book, and I feel bad that I didn’t, but it is what it is.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada/Hamish Hamilton for providing me with an eARC of Gingerbread in exchange for an honest review.

[s.penkevich [mental health hiatus] · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.’
― W.H. Auden

An element of fairy tales that I particularly enjoy is the way you allow the story to happen to you like a wave washing over you. Literature that utilizes the genre effectively taps into a primordial reading experience that bears the wonderment of a world where magic and danger may lurk unexpectedly all around and the fantastical is still possible. You don’t question the oddities, you gleefully plunge deeper down the rabbit hole. Helen Oyeyemi has perfected the fairy tale medium over her 15 year career and her sixth novel, Gingerbread, is a marvelous addition to her catalog. Whereas her earlier works tended to experiment with a specific tale in an exciting new way, such as Mr. Fox did with Bluebeard or Boy, Snow, Bird did with Snow White, here she mixes familiar elements (there is a large homage to Hansel and Gretel at play, as well as Shakespearian allusions) in order to construct her very own fable. Gingerbread is a book you experience akin to a dream. Propelled by prose that is about as close to magic as one can find in the world, it consumes the reader with its own elusive logic in a hazy yet comforting realm slightly adjacent to reality. This is a story about family and a family recipe for gingerbread, but it is also an insightful look at African diaspora, Brexit, identity and class relations all as delicious ingredients for a fantastic modern fairy tale that pays homage to traditional structures and theories.

Oyeyemi has a true talent with words. The prose rises from the page and consumes your senses much like one imagines Harriet’s gingerbread would. There is something about it that feels dreamlike and just beyond reach. I find that Wes Anderson films have a similar effect: it all feels somehow behind glass and unable to be touched, or like a play that is unconcerned if there is an audience as a good friend once stated. Both also have names that are just delicious to hear and say, like Gretel Kercheval or Dottie Cooper in Gingerbread. Oyeyemi’s imagery in the novel is stunning--the opening description of Margot, Harriet, and Perdita’s apartment high up an impractical building that reflects the idea of a gingerbread house, for instance--and is so physically mapped and ornate in the mind as if Oyeyemi wanted to be sure you shared her vision. There is a dry field with a giant jack-in-the-box that occasionally pops out throughout the day that is read like a fleeting moment from a dream that sticks deep within you but you can’t grasp. Moments like this are what make the novel truly gorgeous but also like something that happened TO you and not something you participated in. Which, if you can let down your ego, is a good thing as it is also thematic to a novel where Harriet must endure the things that happen to her. While some may feel distant from the book, it should be considered that perhaps not all novels are directly for you. In a book about Black women who must flee their country and be taken in like refugees only to be told they are a burden, perhaps not fully grasping it is a privilege. Either way, the elusive quality of the book’s atmosphere is such a strong point that it circles your mind like smoke for days to come: something you know is there but cannot get your hands on.

Gingerbread is a difficult novel to pin down if one were to ask what it is “about”. The novel tells the life story of Harriet Lee from her humble farm beginnings and factory work in Druhástrana, a potentially imaginary island nation that might merely by ‘a profound mistranslation of Czech humor’, to her move to the UK and all the tangled webs of extended family she encounters. The bulk of the novel is framed as Harriet telling the story to her daughter Perdita Lee (a nod to Perdita, daughter of King Leontes in Shakespeare’s The Winter's Tale, a reference that also takes life with a nod to the play in the question over who is Perdita’s father later in the novel) in order to explain how she came to be. However, any explanation of the narrative falls short of unlocking the essence of the work.

Literary critic and sociologist Tzvetan Todorov wrote that the understanding of a fairy tale ‘must be narrative mood, or point of view, or sequence, and not this or that story in and for itself,’ so that the point isn’t the story as a whole but the collage of images and events that culminate into a story. Each event, he writes, is a constant flux from equilibrium to disorder and then back to a new equilibrium. Gingerbread embodies this theme through it’s episodic structure of events that accrues into a beautiful portrait of family. Each shift is a constant reestablishing of footing for the Lee family in the world that is continuously shaken again and again.

The episodic nature of the plot that drives it forward so engrossingly also cleverly follows a traditional fairy tale structure termed ‘The Initiation Tale: The Maiden’s Tragedy’ by mythology scholar Walter Burkert. Having regarded Vladimir Propp’s work on the 31 structural elements of fairy tales, Burkert looked at the way the elements serve a problem-solving function. ‘The quest,’ he writes in Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions, ‘is established as the means for problem-solving, and it is represented and communicated through the tale.’ Each moment of disorder confronts Harriet or her mother with a new problem to be solved, such as the oppression of the Druhástranaian tenant farmers who lose money by the year or the fake money Harriet is paid in at the factory. These roadblocks become the modus operandi for plot progression and all follow the structure of ‘the maiden’s tragedy,’ the five key functions of a quest tale for female protagonists that Burkert proposed in addition to Propp’s pattern:

1. An eruption in a young girl’s life that causes her to separate from family and home.
2. Seclusion in an idyllic setting.
3. A catastrophe that drives the girl from the idyllic setting due to her violation of a promise or her being violated.
4. A period of wandering, suffering and atonement.
5. The accomplishment of a set of tasks or rescue that brings about a happy ending.

Gingerbread follows this structure, though in a way that subverts several of them. Stage one is seen with Harriet meeting Gretel and leaving the farmstead to work in the gingerbread factory. Stage two is the factory, however it is not as idyllic as it may seem.

The gingerbread factory functions on many levels. There is a sense of the rural vs city life at play here as well as an admonishment on the dehumanizing aspects of capitalism and it’s favorite weapon: marketing. The farm girls are taken to a factory in the capital city that also serves like an eyes-only brothel where they must perform ‘traditional’ dances and flirt with customers to encourage them to buy the product. The dances are not actually traditional, which serves as a pointed critique on cultural fetishization, such as the ‘traditional tulip festival’ we hold annually where I live in Holland, Mi full of faux traditional dances and Americanized celebrations at which authentic Dutch visitors scratch their heads. On the surface, this factory is an idyllic place where the girls are forced to talk about how good they have it despite being kept in dank cells receiving forged letters from their families who, in turn, receive fake letters from their daughters telling of how wonderful they have it. It is later revealed in an embarrassing moment for Harriet when she tries to treat someone to drinks that the money they receive isn’t even real, which is the trigger for the third stage in Burkert’s structure.

The fourth stage is the bulk of the novel, with Harriet and her mother Margot staying with relatives in the UK and trying to make their way in the world, while the fifth, without ruining anything, is rather open ended but involves the crisis in the present from which Harriet tells her story. Though it could also be the open ended haunted house tour at the tail end of the novel and its elusive conclusion. What is most interesting about the framing of the novel as a story about Harriet’s life told in the middle of a crisis, however, is that it invokes the idea of the oral tradition in fables and fairy tales. It also helps construct a destabilizing tone in the novel, such as the way dialogue is written in italics to denote that it was in the past. The narrative jumps back and forth, often interrupted by the inquiries or complaints from Perdita’s dolls, which--for reasons unexplained--are alive and all have plant leaves for hands and function as the guiding fairies in this story (while the novel seems mostly grounded in reality, it is punctuated by magical elements that the reader just accepts, like any fairy tale). The framing is both the call to action as well as the resolution of one of the primary narrative arcs.

What makes Gingerbread most impactful is socio-political critiques it delivers through the fable elements. Jack Zipes, a major fairy tale scholar, speaks on how the fairy tale is a vessel to critique the political in his essay Breaking the Magic Spell.

’[I]f we reread some of the tales with history in mind, and if we reflect for a moment about the issues at stake, it becomes apparent that these enchanting, loveable tales are filled with all sorts of power struggles...and that their real ‘enchantment’ emanates from these dramatic conflicts whose resolutions allow us to glean the possibility of making the world, that is, shaping the world in accord with our needs and desires. In essence, the meaning of the fairy tales can only be fully grasped if the magic spell is broken and if the politics and utopian impulse of the narratives are related to the socio-historical forces which distinguished them...’

Regarding Gingerbread, a novel taking place in the present in the current UK society, if we pause to consider the political landscape of the world many of the novel’s political messages unfold out of the fairy tale magic. The class divide in Druhástrana is self perpetuating through oppression of the lower classes, such as the aforementioned factory issues. When traveling about the city, Harriet notices that everything exists behind gates, quite reflective of the class gatekeeping imposed by the upper classes. Her escapes from the farm, the factory and Druhástrana itself are all made allowable by a familial connection with a member of the upper class. Druhástrana keeps everyone in their place through the sheer impenetrability of paperwork and necessary documents and much upward mobility is merely an illusion (ie, the fake paychecks for the factory girls who were quite literally sold into unpaid labor). A brilliant anecdote is of the two lottery systems there, a fake lottery upheld by the State which uses propaganda to insist on its validity while denouncing the real lottery as fake to gatekeep money within the ruling class.

Druhástrana itself becomes an impressive metaphor for Brexit, which is doubly interesting as the UK figures into the novel but Oyeyemi packs the criticisms of the UK into the fictional nation.It is a place of destabilized identity enforced through its own mythology and the propaganda of it’s textbooks. Harriet learns that a referendum was passed to ‘definitively withdraw from the so-called brotherhood of nations,’ who were ‘trying to propagate distracting inequalities, stuff about physical appearance and who people should and should not fancy and places of prayer that were better than others.’ Druhástrana teaches that they must ‘keep things simple and concentrate on upholding financial inequality.’ Oyeyemi does not hold back when she punches.

The UK is reserved for commentary on the diaspora where Harriet must fit in a new land and find kinship with those she finds can speak her language. Margot and Harriet arrive through a near-death process and are transported to the UK in body bags stacked in a cargo hull, a sharp reference to the slave trade. However, both locations serve as one large commentary on society and with Oyeyemi boundaries are never clearly defined. ‘Talking or thinking about ‘there’ lends ‘here’ a hallucinatory quality that she could frankly do without. Pull the thread too hard and both skeins unravel simultaneously.’ This is the magic of a fairy tale: packing the political into an elusive package.

There are the family politics as well, which is juxtaposed to those of friendship. In the UK, we see the distant relatives--a wealthy sort upheld by convoluted and questionable business--offer their aid as their 'yearly good deed'. This 'good deed' is not unlike the deal-with-the devil Margot and the farmstead family has made with Margot's other relative who owns the factory, her good deed of paying the families to place their children into slavery so they can own their own farms. It is a classic look at the wealthy class' idea of aid to the lower classes that in no way solve the systemic issues creating class divide but merely put a bandage over a festering wound and declare themselves saviors. However, one family member, Gretel, is the only saving grace of these relatives. Gretel is Harriet's only friend and claims to be a Changeling. This trickster figure is also Harriet's saving grace and provides direction in her life, albeit obfuscatingly. In fairy tales nothing is quite what they seem, and the dangerous family members play right into the classic notions of wicked stepmothers (a prominent theme in Oyeyemi's early work Boy, Snow, Bird).

As a whole, Gingerbread is a masterful literary fable. Oyeyemi has drawn from a wealth of theory and carefully constructed references to build magic in the ordinary. The novel meanders and may seem obtuse at times, but, like any good fairy tale, questioning it as you go is beside the point. When the final page concludes, the totality of it is something to behold, particularly with the adorable final passage (shoutout for LGBTQ+ inclusion as well in this novel). Fantastical and fantastic, Oyeyemi is a masterful writer.

4.5/5

'A gingerbread addict once told Harriet that eating her gingerbread is like eating revenge. “It's like noshing on the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they'd got away with it,” the gingerbread addict said. “That heart, ground to ash and shot through with darts of heat, salt, spice, and sulfurous syrup, as if honey was measured out, set ablaze, and trickled through the dough along with the liquefied spoon. You are phenomenal. You've ruined my life forever. Thank you.”'

[Paromjit · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is imaginative, original, if oblique, absurdist and meandering storytelling from Helen Oyeyemi, a family drama, of friendship, class, and an inheritance of a long held traditional family recipe for Gingerbread, which is instrumental in the shaping of their destiny and fortunes. In a novel entitled Gingerbread, there is almost an inevitability that fairytales are involved, such as the well known Hansel and Gretel tale. Additionally, there are talking dolls, a feel of the gothic, the utilising of folklore, the deployment of magical realism, a raft of literary references, and ostensible talk of Gingerbread that allude to our current contemporary issues. Harriet Lee lives in London with her teen daughter, a Perdita curious about Harriet's past and her childhood friend, Gretel Kercheval, from her fictional homeland, Druhastrana, located in Eastern Europe. This inspires Perdita's quest to find Gretel.

I cannot say that I understood all the meanings and purpose in the novel that Oyeyemi may have intended, but I did find it in part a strangely joyous and surprising reading experience, whilst simultaneously oddly unsettling and elusive. I am left reflecting on precisely what it is I have read, and I can see myself doing this for some time. Many readers are likely to find this a frustrating novel if they are looking for plot and the traditional structures of storytelling. I did wonder about what star rating to give it, but in the end settled on 4 stars, primarily because I know I will think about it for some time to come. Many thanks to Pan Macmillan for an ARC.

[Doug · Rating 1 out of 5]

'We're as indivisible as gingerbread dough. Shhh, don't ask me what that means!' p. 221

Ever since the publication of my 'most liked' review of the execrable and inexplicably award-winning Milkman seven months ago, several people (bless their hearts) have inquired: "Doug, do you think anything will ever surpass Burns' tome in sheer awfulness within your lifetime - and inspire you to even greater heights of takedown-dom?" My reply has always been: "Don't be silly! Milkman is the ne plus ultra, nay, the Platonic Ideal of Unreadable Drivel! Nothing will ever even come close to the pain such a novel inflicts." While that, of course, still holds true, a new contender has arisen in the East that doesn't QUITE reach that pinnacle of true dreadfulness - but comes perilously close. Ladies and Gentleman, I give you Exhibit A: Gingerbread!

I had heard good things about author Oyeyemi's previous works, and that they built upon the psychological truths buried in fables and fairy tales, so was expecting something maybe along the lines of Bruno Bettleheim (The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales), or even the sublime poems of Anne Sexton (Transformations) - you know, something clever and intellectually stimulating, tying eternal childhood fears and fantasies to our modern world's problems. And that may indeed have been the author's intent, but the book is so lacking in anything even remotely interesting or intriguing ... or, for that matter, comprehensible, that one gives up even attempting to derive meaning from it.

Whereas Burns revels in just repeating the same stale facts over and over and over again, ad nauseum, till one wants to scream 'Get on with it already', Oyememi instead just piles on fact after fact after fact that never really connect or have any significance whatsoever - an accretion of meaningless details. These are all oddly specific, but at the same time totally arbitrary. It is like listening to someone with a terminal case of ADD prattle on non-stop without ever catching a breath. This 'kitchen sink' approach to just throwing whatever against the wall and seeing if anything sticks, soon grows tiresome, and the characters are all so lacking in individuality or consequence, that one doesn't care what happens to anyone ... especially the 847 interchangeable Kerchevals, none of whom I could ever figure out what their relationship was to each other ... not that it mattered in the slightest.

Towards the end, we get that most hackneyed of storylines finally evolving - should an unwed mother have her unborn child or abort? - but since the narrator of this tale is telling it TO her obviously UNABORTED daughter, there is absolutely no suspense as to the outcome whatsoever.

My interest in this mess was inspired by Ron Charles' exquisite video review, which one can view here - it's far better and funnier than anything in the book itself, and SHOULD have warned me off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXypc....

I know that it is still early in the year, but mark my words: I'm calling it NOW! Gingerbread will most definitely be nominated for the Booker - and given the shite that has won the last few years - I am predicting victory for it!!

[Parenthetical addendum in 2020: well, obvs. I was incorrect in my prognostication there ... I don't know HOW the Booker committee could have overlooked this boring and incomprehensible mess - seems to have pushed all the right buttons for what they DO award!]

And just so your reading of this review isn't a total waste (and since the book itself is so penurious as to NOT even include one!), I humbly include the world's best Gingerbread recipe, my own concoction!

DOUG'S GINGERBREAD

Ingredients
½ cup butter, softened to room temperature
1/4 cup vegetable oil
½ cup dark brown sugar, tightly packed
1 cup unsulphured (mild) molasses
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 ½ cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground dry ginger
4 ounces (8 TBSP) grated fresh ginger (essential - do NOT omit or skimp!)
½ teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon finely ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon grated orange zest
1 cup boiling water
Whipped Cream for topping

Instructions
Preheat oven to 350F and prepare a 9"x9" baking pan by either greasing or lining with parchment paper. Set aside.
Combine butter, oil and brown sugar in a large bowl and use an electric mixer to beat until creamy.
Add molasses, grated fresh ginger, orange zest and stir until well combined.
Add eggs and vanilla extract. Stir well.
In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, spices, and salt.
Gradually add dry ingredients to wet until completely combined.
Carefully stir in boiling water until ingredients are smooth and well-combined.
Pour batter into prepared baking pan and bake at 350F (175C) for 45-50 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean or with a few moist crumbs.
Allow to cool before slicing and serving. Gingerbread tastes best when topped with whipped cream!
Bon Appétit

[emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

how much whimsy is too much whimsy?

previous to reading this i would have said NO SUCH THING with my characteristic (read: annoying) confidence and belief that i am always right, but...

now i think that wherever this falls on the whimsy scale is slightly in excess.

this was fun to read but i'm not going to remember much about it, because none of it settled into my brain comfortably.

i.e., none of it made sense.

bottom line: fun in the moment but no staying power. like a hard candy, or something.

-----------------
tbr review

the author says she "has written nine books so far, none of which contain ‘magical realism’. (Can’t fiction sometimes get extra fictional without being called such names?!)"

to which my response was ooh magical realism! time to add to my tbr

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gingerbread was my most anticipated read of 2019, and sadly it was a letdown. Look at that gorgeous cover! (And no, that's not the only reason I was so hyped.) I read Helen Oyeyemi's short story collection What is Not Yours is Not Yours over a year ago and instantly fell in love with her writing. Then this year I read and loved her novels Mr. Fox and White Is for Witching. So I was really amped-up for the release of this one. Gingerbread has everything AND the kitchen sink; it's too much and it's not well managed. If this is your first Oyeyemi and you don't like it, don't let it dissuade you. This is not the place to start with her work and it's not indicative of the wide range of her talent. I think What is Not Yours is Not Yours or White is for Witching would be good starting points.

Harriet Lee and her mother Margot emigrated to England from Druhástrana many years ago. Druhástrana is a possibly mythical country that according to Wikipedia doesn't exist. Harriet's daughter Perdita is sixteen now and starting to ask questions about her mother's homeland. And about Harriet's childhood friend, the strange and mysterious Gretel Kercheval, who had a hand in all the changes in fortune of Harriet's life. When an emergency makes Harriet realize how serious Perdita is about learning the truth, she begins to tell her a long bedtime story about her past. The Lee family has passed down a recipe for gingerbread for generations. Initially a last resort source of nourishment during lean times, the gingerbread becomes a hotly sought after commodity and changes the Lees' lives.

I think the synopsis on the book flap is misleading. Just so you know, the bulk of this novel is the bedtime story Harriet is telling Perdita. It's mostly a long flashback, whereas the book flap gives off the vibe that it's set more heavily in present day London. More on that later. Again, based on the flap I thought it was going to tie in more closely to famous fairy tales that feature gingerbread, the way Mr. Fox recognizably plays with Bluebeard myths. But Gingerbread doesn't, so don't go in expecting a fairy tale retelling.

There's some really great, beautiful writing at the beginning. I loved how weird and unexpected it was right off the bat. Take this excerpt from pages 1-2:

A gingerbread addict once told Harriet that eating her gingerbread is like eating revenge. "It's like noshing on the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they'd got away with it," the gingerbread addict said. "That heart, ground to ash and shot through with darts of heat, salt, spice, and sulfurous syrup, as if honey was measured out, set ablaze, and trickled through the dough along with the liquefied spoon. You are phenomenal. You've ruined my life forever. Thank you."

There are some very cool, strange things like that throughout. This book is funny, with wittiness and wordplay. Oyeyemi turns well known expressions and concepts inside out in innovative ways. There's a well executed knowing narrative voice, which is a hallmark of her style. Oyeyemi has such a unique and inspiring way of writing about literature; this book has made me want to read Zola and Balzac soon. Her prose is mostly enjoyable, even though I ended up disliking the book.

I liked the real world setting of present-day London, the characters inhabiting it, and that setup more than the Druhástrana story that takes over the book. The rug was pulled out from under me and I was in a different story, time, and place. When reading about the Lees in London, I thought it was so cool Druhástrana was only rumored to exist and most of the world claimed that it didn't. In the beginning of the book, Oyeyemi is great at conveying the intricacies of group dynamics and social intricacies. She captures very specific and universal emotions, often both those things at once. At the novel's start, I really felt the pain of being a perpetual outsider that Harriet and Perdita both experience. This was the most emotionally connected I ever felt to the characters, and as the craziness of the book multiplied, the thread tethering me to them snapped.

This is one of the most bizarre books you will ever read.

One thing's for sure: you'll never be able to tell where Gingerbread is going. Surreal doesn't even begin to cover it. It's like falling into a trippy dream on acid. It's the kind of book where you keep thinking, Did that really just happen? Is that what I think it was? The worlds, both actually on the map (magical realist Britain) and created (Druhástrana) don't feel properly delineated or inhabitable. Too much is unexplained, and it's taken for granted that the reader will just accept it. There's no rhyme or reason to the weird things that keep piling up, one on top of the other.

Gingerbread lacks focus. The story is too meandering, constantly going off on tangents. When I got to these lines towards the end of the book, I was already so over it: "Hmmm . . . Still here? Huh, then it seems you wouldn't mind hearing about the three houses."

I thought at one point maybe the book itself was enchanted, because it's not even that long but it took me forever to finish. It felt like it was dragging on endlessly and I just wanted to be free of this book!

I can see that Druhástrana is a satire of societies, economies, and governments. There are some interesting ideas explored and true statements made concerning these topics. But it can also feel didactic and it's heavy handed with the symbolism. The novel deals with issues of class, including class distinctions and disparity within families. It's about shifting values, homes, and families. It's about immigration and alienation, a feeling of not belonging no matter how hard one strives. But the story that encompasses all these themes just doesn't hold up.

This book literally gave me a headache at one point. It will make your head spin. Take this line: "Just think of all the mayhem a mind-set like this is proving to be the basis of elsewhere, everywhere; there's nothing unique about this . . ."

Reading Gingerbread is a lot of work with no payoff. It's narratively unsatisfying. Gingerbread is trying to do too much and failing, unlike Mr. Fox which juggles a lot and reinvents the wheel. There is some interesting meta commentary on the nature of storytelling and the nature of reality. The characterizations are very technically skilled with myriad details about each person. But I wasn't moved on an emotional level by any of the characters. At one point, I thought maybe I was missing the romantic/sexual elements and more adult feel of Oyeyemi's other books. Perhaps I was annoyed that it was just about family dynamics. But when the romantic plotline came, I wasn't feeling it or the sex scenes. And I usually love those parts of her books! I also like weird fiction! And I usually love Oyeyemi's weird fiction! What can I say: Gingerbread just didn't work for me.

I wanted to like this book. I tried to like this book. Alas, it was just too random for me and it often seemed like so much nonsense. Gingerbread is marred by a frustrating obliqueness. The overabundant elements never come together as a cohesive whole.

[Ron Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Someone must have given Helen Oyeyemi a handful of magic beans when she was born in Nigeria because she’s been planting them ever since. This fantastical writer, who completed her first, acclaimed novel at the age of 18, sows her modern-day stories in the fertile ground of ancient myths and fables.

But Oyeyemi, now 34, isn’t just goosing old fairy tales with contemporary melodies. She’s drawn to what’s most unsettling about these fables: their disorienting logic, their blithe cruelty, their subtle encoding of race and gender. Nor is she in any way beholden to the source material she collects in the dark forest. No matter what characters she’s dealing with, she’s willing to cut off their tales with a carving knife.

Her new novel, “Gingerbread,” is a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses. If you think you know where you’re going in this forest, you’ll soon be lost. Oyeyemi has built her house out of something far more complex than candy.

The novel opens in. . . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...

To watch the Totally Hip Video Book Review of "Gingerbread," click here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/...

[Emily B · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was glad when this was over and tbh I wanted to give up at 40% or even sooner but nevertheless persisted.

The magical realism stuff didn’t work for me.
It all felt a bit all over the place, with huge families and widening character circles and time changing frequently.

For me it just didn’t work

[Umut · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful writing, engaging characters. Some sentences are just to devour. However, it's too abstract for my taste and the plot structure caused me to get bored at times.
So, I think I'll stick to a 3 star at this point and say that I partly enjoyed this book :)

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harriet Lee’s gingerbread is not comfort food. There’s no nostalgia baked into it, no harkening back to innocent indulgences and nursery times. It is not humble, nor is it dusty in its crumb.

It begins with an translated epigraph from Sir Gaiwan and the Green Knight – “The beginning and the end accord hardly ever”, a paragraph which applies less to the book as a whole (the end of the novel does end up roughly according with the start) than to individual sections and sometimes paragraphs.

Oyeyemi is a master of what I can only call digressive description, never one to see a tangent and not want to go off on it, often building a fascinating side story (for example early on, one of the characters ancestors indulging not so much in gallows humour as gallows speed dating) only to sate her imaginative appetite (if not always the readers interest) and return to the main narrative (if that can be even said to exist).

Much of Oyeymi’s previous work has I understand has taken fairy tales as a launch pad for her imagination. In this case the starting point for her narrative excursion is more around Gingerbread itself than Hansel and Gretel (or the Gingerbread Man) per se.

I was however reminded a little of the story of Hansel and Gretel’s second trip to the Gingerbread cottage: at times I would feel that I was starting to follow the trail of the narrative only to retrace my steps and see that those crumbs had been snatched away.

However let me attempt my own trail of crumbs (unfortunately a number were eaten)

• A gift for Gingerbread and a personal brand built around it
• Gingerbread born of afflicted times and made with blighted rye for additional ergot induced frisson
• A coeliac who craves Gingerbread and a mother who craves supplying it
• Talking dolls with body parts replaced by living plants, for example Bonnie bonsai tree for arms – dolls which aim to keep the narrative away from its wider flights of fancy, despite their own fantastical existence
• A Parent Power Association which reaches back and forwards across generations
• Druhastrana (per Wikipedia) Harriet’s birthplace “an alleged nation state of indeterminable geographic location” which nobody knows how to get to.
• An apparent suicide attempt revealed as an attempt to reach a family home
• Twin wheat-sheaf rings
• The sprawling Kercherval family tree
• A conservative, bureaucratic, feudal state scattered with landmarks - a giant clog, a demented hack in the box, a broken loom (all with their own stories)
• Gretels well “there was no tale anybody knew of concerning this well” – but whose tale ends up as the tale of this novel
• Childhood an mdgrowing up, wealth creation, life as a series of mutual exchanges
• A changeling who disputes the bad press her kind have received
• Rigged and non-rigged bizarre lotteries
• Gingerbread girls: cut off from families, fattened up to look like image of healthy country girls, borderline abused by adults all apparently to sell gingerbread
• Houses with attitudes, interior designers as illusionists
• Minimum FrankenWage
• Three future meeting places later seen as definitely-not-haunted houses in Miss Maszkeradi’s masquerade

Helen Oyeymi’s “Gingerbread” is not conventional fare. There’s no narrative baked into it, no harkening back to identikit incidents or novel themes. It is not humble nor is it derivative in its characters.

[Jeffrey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Looking for a book without a plot?!
One that thinks it’s much more clever than it is?!
Need a read that rambles aimlessly without direction or thought?

Then this book is for you!

I found this torturous and was simply begging for it to end... but I’m a person who generally refuses to give up till I’m done.

[Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harriet Lee’s gingerbread is not comfort food. There's no nostalgia baked into it, no hearkening back to innocent indulgences and jolly times at nursery. It is not humble, nor is it dusty in the crumb.
Gingerbread ~~ Helen Oyeyemi


Buddy Read with Micah

Recently, I read Helen Oyeyemi’s Peaces. I don’t quite know what I read, but I do know that I loved it. I wanted to get right back into Oyeyemi’s universe. A word of advice ~~ put some space between Oyeyemi reads. Reading too much of her writing at one time, may cause brief periods of insanity.

After reading Oyeyemi you emerge from a dream, realizing nothing in your world is as it seems.

Helen Oyeyemi says she was influenced by the mysterious place gingerbread holds in classic children’s stories. Gingerbread has a fairytale quality to it, given its talking dolls, four-pupiled children, metaphorical witches, and moral undertones.

Oyeyemi’s tale centers on Harriet as she recounts her upbringing and eventually fleeing from the mysterious country of Druhástrana to her daughter, Perdita. Originally a farm girl from a family known for its addictive gingerbread, Harriet moves ~~ with the recipe ~~ to the center of her home country and finally to London, where she resides at present. Along the way, she experiences the hardships of life ~~ financial, exploitative, romantic, and so on.


In Oyeyemi’s tale, gingerbread is many things ~~ a source of cheap, efficient sustenance; an unwanted gift for unwilling friends; a haunted metaphor for childhood; a fairytale’s sinister shadow; a pathway to a mythical land; a poison; an addictive substance; a vessel for suicide and self-harm; a magical bridge to a place of transcendence. The gingerbread is described as delectable yet tasting inexplicably of revenge ...

The premise here ~~ what premise ~~ is vague. Gingerbread is a story about a troubled family at times, at others, it’s a story about the loss of innocence, it's story of slavery, often, it’s a story of racism and colonialism and often times, it’s incoherent. The whole thing is carefully served as an intergenerational tale, as a mother tells her ~~ suicidal? ~~ daughter ~~ and the teenage girl’s four dolls ~~ the eccentric tale of her youth. At times, I felt like I was reading a hybrid of Joyce & Murakami on meth.

So, what is Gingerbread? Words are failing me. Gingerbread is about mothers and daughters and granddaughters, and farms and cities, and extended families and doing good deeds for the wrong reasons. Our tale starts in England, where Harriet’s daughter Perdita has eaten an unusual batch of gingerbread and goes into a coma, supposedly trying to find the country where her mother and grandmother grew up. We then get to witness a friendship form between two young Druhástranian girls, one of whom’s mother happens to own the gingerbread factory where the other toils away. And then there’s the Kerchevals back in England again, the extremely rich family of dubious origins who take in Harriet and her mother with sweeping consequences. Margot and Harriet and Perdita are subjected to bullying, heartbreak, betrayals, and poverty. They rejoice in beautiful spaces and form unbreakable bonds. And all the while there’s gingerbread, gingerbread, gingerbread ~~ in tins in London, in the Kercheval’s kitchen at three am, in Druhá city boutiques and way back in Margot’s old farmhouse.



What’s left to say? Oyeyemi is a brilliant writer. She mixes fairytales and magical realism with issues of feminism and race in delicious, bite sized pieces. This creates an other worldly tale. It’s incredibly surreal and brilliantly rebellious in its writing. Gingerbreadis the type of book to just read for the simple sensuality of reading …

[Kara Paes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gingerbread is one of the most unique books I have ever read. Helen Oyeyemi's writing is so beautiful and descriptive that she transports you to another world where anything is possible. I did have to read slowly and closely as I found this to be a challenging read but it was incredibly rewarding in the end.

Thank you to Riverhead Books for providing a free review copy via Edelweiss.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very recently I read White Is for Witching and, wanting more Oyeyemi, I almost immediately started this one. If I wasn’t as enamored of it as the former, I still enjoyed many of its elements, and it certainly showed me Oyeyemi’s range, as it is the opposite of the other: less streamlined; much wordier; a ton of plot, brimming over with incidents. So much is going on that patience is required to sort it all out (that’s not a complaint, it’s rewarding). In Gingerbread, unlike in White Is for Witching, houses aren’t menacing; some are even playful. That last adjective could describe the whole book, though it has serious themes, too: dire poverty despite hard work; immigration; the class system; wealth distribution; and their enablers.

The fictional country the main character Harriet hails from reminded me of the “underground world” the mother in Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels escapes from. The latter, though, is a dark retelling of the sisters Snow White (not of the dwarves) and Rose Red. As you might expect in a novel titled Gingerbread, the Hansel-and-Gretel story is its foundation, though its elements aren’t ubiquitous. Gingerbread (the food) is both magical and a commodity. This novel and the Lanagan also share the theme of so-called nontraditional families, of mothers being single, and for good reasons.

At the same time as this, I was reading one of the four essays in Elena Ferrante’s In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing and it gave me another way to view the relationship of the friends Harriet and Gretel, which is at the core of Gingerbread. It was so timely, it felt eerie. I’ll likely have more to say in my review of the Ferrante, but for now I’ll just say that Ferrante’s ideas about women writing women by de-forming [the dash is mine] traditional forms (genres) smacked me on the forehead when the POV of Gingerbread switches (oh so briefly) to the first person. Then when the phrase, “your scribe,” appears: Mind blown.

Another literary coincidence: Before starting this book, I was discussing the legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with someone, and, lo and behold, Gingerbread’s epigraph is taken from it: “The beginning and the end accord hardly ever."

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lewis Carroll's quote: "Curiouser and curiouser" comes to mind as I try to describe this book. It certainly felt like I had gone down the rabbit hold at times. I loved the first half and remained fully fascinated. Was it a stream of consciousness? I thought the writer a genius! The second half was less shiny for me and sometimes caused me to lean out, rather than in, however, overall, it was a marvelous read that touched on many subjects.

Indeed, talking of subjects, I would be hard pressed to mention one not covered in this book. In fact, subjects included a wide and diverse range from the heavy weight to the light and fluffy, from serious abuses to reading the Farmers Almanac to cows!

I listened to the audiobook, which was an interesting challenge. If my mind wandered momentarily, as it is wont to do, I would have no idea where the story was at as I 'came to' again, as the book moved scenes as if in a movie or dream. I wonder if I had read it in another format if I would have had a different experience?

To close, I will include my favorite passages. Curiously, both come from teatime scenes:
"When they got bored during afternoon tea they'd pick a guest they felt they could nudge out of his or her right mind. A man or woman of straight-laced appearance, a black coffee drinker with too much discipline to reach for anything sweet." This scene had a macabre feel to it as Oyeyemi artfully includes the description of eating gingerbread.
Later on in the book, I loved the description of the teatime setting and then, the conversation took on the surreal, which was fascinating, Salomiya (spelling?) discussed the delicious pastries on display and "She told Harriet that bite sized was best, that as an infant she had waited until she had two good strong teeth and then, hello world! She bit her way through it." When she shows Harriet her first two teeth, Harriet responds, "They look sturdy, you can tell they are pioneers."

[Jules · Rating 5 out of 5]

🍊🍊🍊
if Murakami had a take on ‘Great Expectations,’ mixed it with fairytale magic, and sprinkled ‘fucks’ all over it — what a joy.

“That heart, ground to ash and shot through with darts of heat, salt, spice, and sulphorous syrup . . . you are phenomenal. You’ve ruined my life forever. Thank you.”

[Donna · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was my first time reading this author and I fear it may be the last if her other books are anything like this one. I knew going in it would be a weird story, and I was okay with that. I was in the mood for something weird or magical, or some sort of modern day fairy tale which would distract me from what’s going on in the real world these days. And for the first part of this book, I got what I had imagined and was satisfied. I was intrigued by the off kilter story, and I felt sympathetic toward the main characters, a mother and daughter, each with secrets that were about to be spilled after a tragedy hit their small family.

I felt drawn to the mother, Harriet, who was raising her teenaged daughter, Perdita, on her own and longed for her daughter’s acceptance and that of the other mothers in town. I also sympathized with Perdita who, unlike her mother, only wanted to escape notice by her fellow students who were only too happy to oblige. And then, there were the quirky elements of Perdita’s unique dolls, and the famous or rather infamous gingerbread that Harriet was always baking in huge batches and forcing on everyone. The recipe was based on one handed down through the generations, the original ingredients questionable, to say the least. So what wasn’t to like about this book besides that recipe? Even the grandmother, Margot, added much fun to the story and had me fascinated and wanting to learn more about these people.

But slowly, as the book progressed, I became less and less invested in the story which meandered from the moment it went back in time, and I became disappointed by these characters who acted in ways no one would act under those circumstances, especially when the story returned to the present. The blend of realism and fantasy at that point did not mix well and only had me feeling disconnected to the characters and their story at large. This had me a little peeved at the author for manipulating her characters to act in ways that were unnatural to them so her story could be as weird as she imagined and play out as it did. At that point, I didn’t feel I could like this book anymore, either as a family drama or as a fairy tale or whatever it was the author was shooting for. I just felt let down that the author had made her characters into paper dolls traipsing through her imaginary storyland rather than have them continue to take on a life of their own and burst off the page, which all the best fantasies achieve. The potential in the beginning went unfulfilled and the ridiculous ending only sealed that for me. It brought this book down from a possible four stars to only two stars by the end.

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an odd, delightful, confusing book. I just love Oyeyemi's voice and how she weaves these strange books that are like fairy tales and contemporary stories all at once. There were some parts of this story of three generations of women from a maybe fictional country that had me puzzled about what was happening and what significance there was, but also I loved the writing throughout so I didn't mind. There's something being said here about immigration that I'm not catching too. Oh, and some pleasantly surprising incidental queerness. Hmm, this is one of those books I wish I'd read in my English lit degrees so I could learn from a prof and fellow students while discussing it!

[Kyra Leseberg (Roots & Reads)]

DNF at 30%

Magical realism is hit or miss with me. Certain books in the genre are charmingly quirky and others go right over my head. Unfortunately, Gingerbread was a miss for me.

Helen Oyeyemi is undoubtedly a talented writer who can expertly command the page so I was excited to read this upcoming release. I appreciate her originality but this novel was underwhelming for me. The quirky lives of Perdita and Harriet Lee are shared in a fairy tale style influenced by the classic children's story Hansel and Gretel.

By the 30% mark I found myself skimming through the quirky descriptions of Druhástrana and Harriet's fateful childhood meeting with Gretel and decided to bail since I couldn't fully appreciate the story.

Readers who truly enjoy magical realism and retellings will likely love Gingerbread.

Thanks to Riverhead Books and Edelweiss for providing me with a DRC for review. Gingerbread is scheduled for release on March 5, 2019.

[Ygraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

"the gingerbread recipe is one of the lean-year recipes, and it stands out because the lean-year recipes are all about minimizing waste and making that which is indigestible just about edible. none of it tastes good save the gingerbread, which is exactly as delicious as it has to be. blighted rye was the family's food of last resort, and the jeopardy in using it was so great that it made great-great-great-grandma really think about how to take the edge off. out came the precious ingredients, the warmth of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger, the best saved for last. after this gingerbread you might sweat, swell and suffer, shed limbs. often that didn't happen - often the strenuous sifting of the grain expelled just enough ergot to make this an ordinary meal as opposed to a last meal. but just in case, just in case, gingerbread made the difference between choking risk down and swallowing it gladly.

that temporary subtraction of fear still gives harriet's mother goosebumps. it is a veiling of alternatives, a way of making sure you don't reject the choice mother's made for you. no matter what, you will not starve."

sometimes i'm not sure where the line between purposefully ambiguous text and clumsy reader falls, and sometimes i feel certain that there's something that i am missing or somehow blind to, a way of seeing that i've never learnt and will never master. it's a wondering wandering part of my mind that frustrates me, because it reminds me of the thousands of things i have missed in the books i've read, the things i'm missing now, the infinite things i'll miss in all the books yet to come: it reminds me that maybe my identity as a reader, and as someone who wants to be a critic, a theorist, a someone with some sort of structure in her brain for the things she thinks and writes, will be forever unstable and based on thinking and seeing the wrong things.

and yet. i have a dissertation-that-isn't-really on metaphor, on a way of thinking about figurative language and metaphorical structures that isn't about mapping what represents what or what means something else, but about what is happening in between the two terms of the metaphor, what is created when two things are forced to occupy the same conceptual space, and it isn't clear and maybe isn't worth the writing (i probably won't know until i've written it again, and again). and oyeyemi's work is at the heart of that dissertation, because her narratives are confusing and ambiguous and beautiful, and very much about the place between, the uncomfortable, unclear, generative space where things are what they say they are, and also are something else, and are most interestingly both in a way that transforms them into something new.

i suppose what i'm trying to say is that i always feel so entirely disorientated by oyeyemi's writing, turned round again and again by the sinuous, insinuating, slippery quality of her language, lost in the origami folding of meaning where points seem to meet and join but end in entirely different places. it's work that should make me feel most lacking, most ill-equipped to meet it where it is and understand even a fraction of it, because in theory, it exists in the blind spot i wish i didn't have, my own discomfort with not knowing how to make sense of something. instead, it delights me - gingerbread, especially, delights me - because i don't feel compelled to fill the gaps in my own understanding, i feel compelled to write into those gaps, to test out the things they make me think and feel. i'm challenged, i suppose, but also just enchanted, inspired, fascinated, endlessly curious. i don't want to make sense of this book, or any of oyeyemi's books, in a surgical, incisive way, i just want to respond to them and come back to them and never be finished with them.

[Lyra (Cardan's tail's version) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Safe to say that the cover was the best part 😞

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I ’m not sure how to put this....

Try putting it in terms of gingerbread.

This is a difficult novel to review as I strongly admire what Helen Oyeyemi is doing, and appreciate her influences, without being convinced that the result was a totally satisfactory reading experience.

In the 21st century, I do find it odd how much of our literature is still rooted in the 19th century realist novel, which was just one step on the novel's evolution. See my review of Javier Cercas's brilliant The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Novel, tr. Anne McLean, for more on this: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Oyeyemi's focus instead on the pleasure of storytelling, recapturing the delight of fairy tales and building on absurdist, modernist literature is to be commended. From a 2011 interview talking of her favourite writers, which sums up also her own approach:

Jesse Ball – ‘He’s a brilliant, brilliant novelist,’ she says emphatically. ‘He’s like a modernist writer with an adventure angle. Do you know Daniil Kharms, the Russian absurdist writer? He reminds me of absurdist surrealist mixed with rip-roaring adventure tales. He’s a poet as well and it really comes through in what he writes – his sentences are very clear and sharp and slightly odd in a really creepy way.’

I also admire is the clever way she uses the fable like nature of her stories (Saramago style) to speak to our modern world. Or does she? Gingerbread is after all simply a book about Gingerbread (although not a retelling of Hansel and Gretel). It opens with Harriet Lee and her gingerbread:

Harriet Lee's gingerbread is not comfort food. There's no nostalgia baked into it, no hearkening back to innocent indulgences and jolly times at nursery. It is not humble, nor is it dusty in the crumb.
...
A gingerbread addict once told Harriet that eating her gingerbread is like eating revenge. “It ’s like noshing on the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they ’d got away with it, ” the gingerbread addict said. “Thatheart, ground to ash and shot through with darts of heat, salt, spice, and sulphurous syrup, as if honey was measured out, set ablaze and trickled through the dough along with the liquefied spoon. You are phenomenal. You ’ve ruined my life for ever. Thank you. ”

Much of the novel comprises Harriet telling her life story to her daughter Perdita, and her 4 talking dolls (!), who frequently interrupt the account. A story of how Harriet was born in the isolated land of Druhástrana, whose Wikipedia entry (there is little else on the web) reads:

Druhástrana (druhástranae) is the name of an alleged nation state of indeterminable geographic location. Very little verifiable information concerning Druhástrana is available, as there have been several prominent cases of stateless people claiming Druhástranian citizenship under a form of poetic license, and other, yet more unfortunate cases in which claims to Druhástranian citizenship or ancestry have been proven to result from false memories or flawed cognitive information.
...
To date, Druhástrana has been formally recognized by only three nations. (See: Czech Republic,
Slovakia, and Hungary.) Slovakia revoked recognition of Druhástrana without explanation on January 1, 2010, and Hungary followed suit on January 1, 2013.

Several prominent thinkers have proposed reclassifying Druhástrana as a purely notional/mythical land since a) nobody seems to actually come from there or know how to get there and b) literal interpretations of the assertion that Druhástrana exists may be a profound mistranslation of Czech humor.

We later learn that Druhástrana's isolation - their flag has three black griffins turning their backs on the world - is a result of referendum:

The referendum has been the only way to definitively withdraw from the so-called brotherhood of nations; let them see, yes, they’d all see how well they got on without all the contributions Druhástrana he made towards world peace.

Hmm, what real-life referendum could Oyeyemi be thinking of? In case it's not obvious Druhástrana acknowledges the inspiration it has taken from British history. So a Brexit novel? Well no, you see, it's a novel about gingerbread. From an author interview (https://hazlitt.net/feature/i-read-bo...

Gingerbread is a way to talk about many things, and then, like, if someone says [gasps] you just say, “Oh, it’s just about gingerbread, I’m only talking about gingerbread.”

In some way I feel like it’s a female way of telling stories, I feel like feminine stories have always been quite coded in that way, just in case anyone tries to, like, burn me at the stake or something, you can be like, “No, I was just talking about gingerbread.”

Harriet came to London, where she now lives, via Whitby in Yorkshire, after she and her mother are persuaded to move by a rich family, the Kerchevals, hoping to make commercial profits from Druhástrana gingerbread. They make the journey after first rendering themselves catatonic, to facilitate their people smuggling (as post referendum Druhástranian citizens have no passports) by - you've guessed it - eating gingerbread.

(A comment on modern capitalism? You might think so, but remember she's only talking about gingerbread).

The book was started and largely written in South Korea and finished in Oyeyemi's current residence of Prague, and shows a strong influence from both cultures.

Druh ástrana is Czech for 'the other side', and the novel feels rooted in the eastern European tradition of absurdist adventure literature - Daniil Kharms , as noted, is one acknowledged influence and Gustav Meyrink's Golem. I was reminded of Michal Ajvas and his 'Druhé město' / 'The Other City (tr. Gerald Turner) as well as 'Zlatý věk' / 'The Golden Age' (tr. Andrew Oakland) which contains a similarly hidden civilisation.

From Korea, although Oyeyemi has spoken highly of Han Kang and Hwang Jungeun, the influence is stronger from the highly addi ctive genre of K-drama s, as the author has explained:

I think those, fairytales and K-Drama have something in common. They’re stories that don’t really need you to believe them, they ’re just saying. But the things that they’re just saying are resonant on all kinds of levels, like, you laugh, and you sort of wince, and you cry, you just have these responses to what seems like an elaborate, or a vocabulary of, it almost seems like psychology archetypes that they’ve arranged for you and circulated so that you see them in a completely new way.

I was also delighted to see a cameo appearance (the author's words from the same interview) by Jeju Island (she records that on her first visit "I was completely overwhelmed and absorbed in the best way by how lush Jeju is. It was a tumbling into the sea of impressions."). In the novel it takes the form of what is asserted to be, correctly in my view:

the most beautiful island in the world. Though when I say 'most beautiful' I don't mean least scarred.

and in the novel it is the site of a real gingerbread house:

The legend began at the foot of the a volcano’s bed, the volcano having pain dormant at amidst fields of silver grass for hundreds of years – long enough to have acquired at least six different and equally accurate names(*), long enough to have watched over many lives and deaths, and many changes, for which the appearance of this house was one… a minor change for a mountain, but a big headache for an estate agent.

* a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallasa...



So why my frustration?

Well I think her own benchmark of K-drama is the reason why. However implausible the premise, one finds oneself while watching entirely caught up in the characters, genuinely emotionally invested in, say, the relationship between the 939-year-old immortal goblin and the fried chicken shop owner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardia...).

But here the rather random nature of the story (there seems little internal logic, deliberately so, Harriet at one point noting that everyone around her was living out a different story in which events had different causes and motivations according to how they were perceived) rather removes any narrative tension. And the middle-section describing the Rushdiesque extended family of Kerchavals rather saw this reader's interest wander.

2.5 stars rounded up to 3 for the Jeju references.

[Hillary Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helen Oyeyemi has done it again! Gingerbread will innocently hold out a hand and lead you though a deliciously dark tale of family, home, wealth, friendship and class. I am a devoted fan of all of Oyeyemi's work, but this might be my favorite yet. I loved loosing myself in this world where magic is blurry around the edges, so you can't quite tell what your looking at unless you catch it out of the corner of your eye. Gingerbread will be haunting you long after you turn the last page.

[Jerrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

While it was sometimes difficult to get a hold on the story line, this whimsical and intriguing book was still enjoyable. The audiobook is read by the author and her voice is incredibly charming and lends a further fairy tale feel to the story.

[Helen]

This book put me into a book depression. I don't even know if I like reading anymore.

[Paula W · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has been quite a while since I have enjoyed a book this much that didn’t have a strong plot or strong characters. The basic plot outline, I guess, is that there is an odd, sort of magical family living amongst normal folks. Dolls talk, countries may exist only in a “Room or Requirement” kind of way, and the gingerbread made from the family recipe can change people’s lives and attitudes.

None of the characters are particularly likeable, and the plot is all over the place. WHO CARES? I didn’t. It was lovely. The writing, the language, the thoughts and emotions evoked... all of those things were lovely. It definitely makes me want to read more by this author.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I . . . don't know what this was. But I know that I loved it. "Wondrous strange" are the words I can best use to describe it.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars, would like to remain solid right there, rounding neither up nor down. Up, down? It could go either way for me. With some hesitation, I’ve rounded up

I have read other books by Helen Oyeyemi and enjoyed them. They have been interesting and always imaginative, laced with and built upon elements of myth and fairy tale. Her writing is solid, often beautiful, and I admire her for pursuing her unique vision. I saw her at a reading for her previous novel and she came across as an intelligent, charming and sweet young woman. For those reasons, it pains me to write that I really didn’t care for this novel at all. It was just way too odd and strange for me, so heavy on the fantasy elements as to annoy (I prefer it in smaller, more subtle doses). And what is it exactly? I wasn’t sure what to make of it or even what Oyeyemi was trying to say. A head-scratching, disjointed plot, left me very disappointed.

One of my GR friends, Doug, wrote a wonderful, scathing review of this, complete with a video and a recipe. You must check it out if you haven’t already! His review is far more clever and entertaining than what you're reading right now. I didn’t hate it quite as much as Doug did - it had its moments, although few. I also don’t have any exciting extras to offer (that would make me a copy-cat anyway). No original recipe to offer (I use one from The King Arthur Baking Companion) and no video. I will, however, include a review from the NY Times Book Review since it is the reason I read this novel. The novel snagged the front page on March 17 (always prestigious to land that front page). Initially, I only scanned the review and had looked forward to reading it fully when I finished, hoping to understand the novel better and make something of its strangeness. It gave me a few things to mull over and consider - a tiny bit of appreciation - but it didn’t really change my overall reaction. Readers who like fabulist fiction might really enjoy this, but it didn’t work for me.

Since I refer to it and as a counterpoint:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/bo...

[Brenda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sadly, not a big hit for me. I found the set up and premise so enchanting, but by the middle - as Harriet is about mid-way through her reminiscing with Perdita - things sort of muddled and grew dull. The mounting list of characters cropping up and who really didn’t add much to the story and all the way through to the ending, I found myself dragging.

Lyrical and full of fun magical realism, but with a story that really doesn’t do much or even go anywhere, this book was an unfortunate let down.

Which stinks, because I really loved Harriet and wanted to know her secrets, her history promised so much enchantment and mysticism...but once revealed, they just didn’t seem that extraordinary.

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

A gingerbread addict once told Harriet that eating her gingerbread is like eating revenge. “It's like noshing on the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they'd got away with it,” the gingerbread addict said. “That heart, ground to ash and shot through with darts of heat, salt, spice, and sulfurous syrup, as if honey was measured out, set ablaze, and trickled through the dough along with the liquefied spoon. You are phenomenal. You've ruined my life forever. Thank you.”

Helen Oyeyemi is such an inventive and original writer – Gingerbread is the second novel I've read of hers, after Boy, Snow, Bird a few years ago – and while, once again, I was dazzled by her turns of phrase, enchanted by her fable-like ethos, I was, once again, underwhelmed by the overall story and reading experience. What began as absolutely bewitching became, frankly, dull and pointless; I could forgive a story for no deeper meaning if only it had more story to it. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)

Harriet and Margot have the kind of past that makes the present dubious. Talking or thinking about “there” lends “here” a hallucinatory quality that she could frankly do without. Pull the thread too hard and both skeins unravel simultaneously. Still. Each time Harriet raises her hand, she sees the two rings on her middle finger. The unaltered fact of Gretel is promising.

As Gingerbread begins, we meet three generations of the Lee family; two (soon to be three) prematurely grey-haired women who share a family gingerbread recipe and roots in the far-off country of Druhástrana (which doesn't exist on official maps, to the women's consternation). It seems to be a story about the overwhelmed mother (Harriet) of a semi-difficult teenager (Perdita) living in London, and Harriet's efforts to fit in (and make friends through gingerbread) are by turns funny and touching. As weirdly magical and unsettling events are taken as routine in the Lee household, there's a feeling that anything could happen; and I liked that feeling. A major event prompts Harriet to finally tell her daughter the story of how she and her mother, Margot, left Druhástrana, and everything set in that country was weird and imaginative and thoroughly entertaining. When the story moved to Harriet and Margot's early days in England, however, I found the whole thing convoluted with interchangeable characters that I couldn't keep straight (and that I didn't care about), and as the timeline catches up to the present and carries on to what happens next, I was thoroughly bored; the ending doing nothing to make the overall experience more worthwhile in retrospect.

Perdita's been giving it a lot of thought, and she thinks they mistook her for Harriet. She is, after all, about the age that Harriet was when they last saw her, and they are as much alike in build and facial features as one would expect a mother and daughter to be. One wouldn't call them twins, but seeing Perdita for the first time must have been like seeing Harriet after an interval, after a few details had been forgotten. The gray-haired seventeen-year-old comes in and she's like a gingerbread ghost, her chronological age bearing very little relation to her exterior. Then Perdita spoke, and Halloween was canceled.

Still, even in the dull bits, there are these engaging passages that I admired. I liked that, while it's never stated straight out that Druhástrana is a nation of Black people, references to dreadlocks and dark skin make you realise that it must be – and it was interesting to me to consider that when no mention is made of race, I must be defaulting to white in my mind if such hints are telling me that I'm imagining it wrong. Also interesting to read about characters of no fixed sexuality – more than one dabbles in a relationship with the opposite sex, and then in same sex, without commentary or surprise to those around them. Despite changelings and curses and talking dolls, Oyeyemi writes a world where people just are what they are, without labels or society dragging them down. The scenes set in Druhástrana (a name which Wikipedia tells me was also the name of a Slovakian rap group that translates into English as “over there”) were just interesting enough to make me not regret reading Gingerbread, but I can't say this was really to my taste.