Title: White is for Witching Author: Helen Oyeyemi
Published: June 23, 2009
Genre(s): Magical Realism
Page Count: 304
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:There’s something strange about the Silver family house in the closed-off town of Dover, England. Grand and cavernous with hidden passages and buried secrets, it’s been home to four generations of Silver women—Anna, Jennifer, Lily, and now Miranda, who has lived in the house with her twin brother, Eliot, ever since their father converted it to a bed-and-breakfast. The Silver women have always had a strong connection, a pull over one another that reaches across time and space, and when Lily, Miranda’s mother, passes away suddenly while on a trip abroad, Miranda begins suffering strange ailments. An eating disorder starves her. She begins hearing voices. When she brings a friend home, Dover’s hostility toward outsiders physically manifests within the four walls of the Silver house, and the lives of everyone inside are irrevocably changed. At once an unforgettable mystery and a meditation on race, nationality, and family legacies, White is for Witching is a boldly original, terrifying, and elegant novel by a prodigious talent.
Helen Oyeyemi’s books are so distinctively themselves, unlike anything else out there. Really, I’m at a loss as to what I could possibly compare her work to, and that’s a rare thing for me to say. White is for Witching combines intellectual commentary with easy-to-read, lyrical prose, and the end result is a strange, one-of-a-kind novel that’s deliciously surreal and vague.
I haven’t read Shirley Jackson, but I rather imagine that this book is the 21st century answer to Jackson’s writing. From a variety of viewpoints (including that of a house), White is for Witching reveals the story of Miranda Silver, a teenager who’s dealing with a lot of issues. She was diagnosed with an eating disorder, pica, at an early age, and when her mother dies, things on that front are exacerbated. Miranda has a strange relationship with her brother, Eliot, and it seems like the ghosts of her foremothers and her house itself are attempting to influence her life. This is a book that combines real-life events with a surreal background, and the reader is left with a lot of questions.
Not going to lie, at some points in the first half, I found this book to be fairly confusing. The various first-person narrators weren’t clearly marked (on purpose, I’m sure), so I could never tell if it was the house telling the story, or if it was Miranda’s brother. I at times felt very lost in a swirling, mixed-up narrative, but I think that was rather the point. Oyeyemi’s presentation of Miranda is disorienting, and the book constantly calls readers to decide for themselves what’s happening.
Oyeyemi’s prose, as usual, is a delight to read. It has it’s own distinct style to it, no matter who is narrating or what the topic is. Beyond the strangeness of the text itself, one of my favorite parts about White is for Witching was how the author’s words and descriptions took the reader by hand, leading them deeper into the strange world Miranda inhabits.
For a reader who can deal with being dizzied and lost, White is for Witching is an enjoyable modern Gothic novel. Helen Oyeyemi is a talented author whose creativity sets apart her apart from other authors being published today. Not many authors have the skill to pull off a book like this, but Oyeyemi does, and she did.
