White is for Witching: A Novel [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Helen Oyeyemi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 23, 2009

“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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred 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)
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From Booklist

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. --Deborah Donovan

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese (June 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385526059
• ISBN-13: 978-0385526050
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #203,846 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars (4.5) Haunting and unsettling, June 29, 2009

By 

Kelly (Fantasy Literature) (Columbia, MO United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: White is for Witching: A Novel (Hardcover)

_White Is for Witching_ blends gothic horror, racial politics, and the older, bloodier sort of fairy tales into a deeply unsettling novel. The story opens with a passage intentionally reminiscent of "Snow White," describing the mysterious imprisonment? disappearance? death? of the heroine, Miranda Silver. From there, we move backward in time, to the point when the events leading to Miranda's fate began.

The story is told from several points of view, all of them seeing events from different perspectives, all of them possibly unreliable narrators. Miranda herself, her brother Eliot, her lover Ore, and her ancestral home all have their own versions to tell as the plot unfolds.

The house looms as the center of Miranda's tale. Menacing and xenophobic, it desires control over the people it considers its own, and means harm toward those it sees as foreign. The house and its ghosts want to make Miranda a vessel for their hatred. Miranda struggles against the house's domination, a battle that threatens to destroy her mental health and possibly her life.

Oyeyemi's prose is haunting and poetic. I hesitate to use the word "beautiful," as that might give a false impression of "pleasantness." Oyeyemi depicts nightmares, not pretty dreams. She has a knack for describing ordinary things in a way that makes them suddenly horrific, and when she describes horrific things, she does it in a subtle, oblique way that feels like you're looking at something so unspeakable that you can only look with your peripheral vision.

_White Is for Witching_ works as a novel of the supernatural, and it also works as an allegory. I hesitate to even mention the A-word, for fear of driving away readers who've been burned by preachy authors. Oyeyemi doesn't preach, however. There's a message, but it never overshadows the plot and characters. It's just that you can see an extra dimension to the story if you look through the lens of allegory.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "It was she who'd fallen asleep and lost Lily's life.", June 23, 2009

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: White is for Witching: A Novel (Hardcover)

A gifted young writer, Oyeyemi is a master of imagery. This novel is no exception, overflowing with startling images that range from the lush to the disturbing. A small family moves to Dover, where the father fulfills his dream: a bed and breakfast. It is Lily Silver's ancestral home, one animated by its own dark history; Luc Dufresne, Lily's husband, is enchanted all the same. The couple's young twins, Eliot and Miranda, quickly adapt to their new environment, enchanted by the woods and the many-storied house. The particular magic of their twin world is fully realized, the reflection of self in the other, an extraordinary beauty times two. If Luc remains outside the magic circle of wife and children, he does not complain. He cooks marvelous meals while Lily travels, capturing the souls of strangers with her camera.

One terrible night when the twins are sixteen, Eliot urges Miranda to remember Lily's every detail, not to fall asleep. That night Lily is killed in Port-Au-Prince. Miranda is bereft. Everything changes, a perfect world distorted by Lily's death. Afflicted with pica, a condition that compels sufferers to ingest the inedible- in her case, chalk- Miranda's disorder accelerates, the girl half in this world, half in another. Eliot bears his own grief and guilt, but as Miri drifts into a dark place that grows larger as her body diminishes, the bindings of twinship unravel. He cannot save Miranda.

Oyeyemi's characters are as colorful as the house (charmed or malicious, you decide):Ore, the Nigerian student Miri meets at Cambridge, the girls drawn into an obsessive relationship that shimmers with passion and threat; Sade, the African housekeeper who realizes her juju is insufficient to ward off the spirits in this house; and the hapless Luc, who so desperately wants to save his sad daughter, tempting her with magical concoctions as though food will heal her damaged psyche.

For all the elegiac beauty of the author's language, there darkness dwells at the heart of this novel, a relentless, powerful entity, either Miri's Goodlady or Ore's soucouyant, a mythical old woman who eats souls: "Her only interest in other people is consumption". Like a great, greedy goblin, this house, insatiable, savors its secrets: the twins' unsettling gray eyes, Miri's sheaf of black hair and white skin, malevolent whispers that leak from rooms at night, a sunlight-starved netherworld. At the heart of the novel is a scream against the cruelty of fate, any other existence preferable to the loss of Lily, even one that shimmers with malice. For all the magic of Oyeyemi's writing, I am overwhelmed finally by the sadness, the weight of darkness that thrives by extinguishing Miri's light as she slides from transcendent beauty to soulless specter, from fairy tale princess to succubus. Luan Gaines/2009.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars What a disappointment!, January 26, 2012

By 

Darlene (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: White Is for Witching (Hardcover)

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.