![]() The setup seems simple enough, but it gets trickier from there. Perdita has reached the age of curiosity about the mysteries that surround her family, including the gingerbread recipe that is something like a family legacy or curse, and the land of their supposed origin, Druhástrana (which one character uses Wikipedia to learn is “an alleged nation-state of indeterminable geographic location”). Gingerbread’s jacket copy gamely attempts to describe the plot: three generations of women named the Lees live together in a gold-painted flat in London–Margot, who is the mother of Harriet, who is the mother of the teenage Perdita. And although Oyeyemi, as she has done in her earlier work, subverts these tropes through a contemporary idiom, the novel’s real enchantment is its experimentation with storytelling itself. Just a few of the new book’s familiar elements include enchanted confectionery, talking dolls, rumors of a faraway land inaccessible by conventional means and a character with the redolent name of Gretel. It would be impossible to discuss Gingerbread, the sixth novel from Helen Oyeyemi–named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2013–without the mention of fairy tales. ![]()
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