BOOK REVIEW: White Is For Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

TITLE: White Is For Witching
AUTHOR: Helen Oyeyemi 
PUBLISHER: Hamish Hamilton CA (AHC)
DATE OF PUBLICATION: June 23, 2009 (first published May 1, 2009)

FORMAT: Hardcover, 224 pages
GENRE: Horror, Fantasy
ISBN: 978-0670068579

SYNOPSIS:

“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.

MY REVIEW: 

 

I chose this book for the January Task of the 2012 Versatile Reading Challenge, which was to read a book by a Nigerian author. It won the 2010 Somerset Maugham Award.

This is quite possibly the oddest book that I have ever read!

The central character to the story is Miranda, an 18 year-old girl whose mother has recently passed away. She is a strange girl who is afflicted with pica, which her mother and grandmother suffered from as well.

The book has multiple narrators: Miranda, Eliot (Miranda’s twin brother), Ore (Miranda’s girlfriend whom she meets in college), and “the house.” I found the multiple narrations very confusing. There is no indication whatsoever when the book is switching narrators. Oftentimes, I thought Miranda would be narrating and then Miranda was mentioned in the third-person, so I knew that I was wrong and had to flip back into the story to figure out where the narration left off with Miranda and to try to figure out who now was speaking! I was really thrown when I realized that it was “the house” that was narrating parts of the book, because I thought that it couldn’t possibly be the house that was speaking!

I eventually figured out that the odd style of overlapping phrases was one visual cue to the change in narrators. This is an example of how it looks in the book:

"It looked so fine on

the mannequin 

proved very useful for me when Miranda, Luc and Eliot left for the airport."

Strange, isn't it?

I have read such high praise for Oyeyemi, and my expectations were high for this book. Unfortunately, the book fell flat for me. I kept reading, hoping that the plot would go somewhere, but it didn’t. With the genre labels of “horror” or “paranormal,” I was hoping for a scary or creepy story but this book did not deliver.

MY RATING: 1 star! I didn’t enjoy it at all. It wasn’t for me. 

This book qualifies as:

#6 for my 2012 Outdo Yourself Reading Challenge 
#2 for my Ghostly Reading Challenge 2012
Task #4 for my 2012 Global Reading Challenge

January's Task for the First Quarter of the Versatile Reading Challenge 2012
#5 for my New Author Reading Challenge 2012
#5 for my Speculative Fiction Challenge 2012 
#2 for my Antonym Reading Challenge 2012
Letter W for my A-Z Book Challenge 2012 
#1 for my 2012 Award Winning Books Reading Challenge
#2 for my 2012 Horror/Thriller Reading Challenge
Task 7 for my 2012 The Color Coded Reading Challenge 

View all my reviews