What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

January 11, 2016
In her first story collection, Oyeyemi (Boy, Snow, Bird) conjures present-day Europe, made enticingly strange by undercurrents of magic, and populated by ghosts, sentient puppets, and possible witches alongside middle-aged psychiatrists, tyrants, and feminist undergrads. Loosely linked by a theme of keys and doors, many of the stories feature female protagonists discovering their sexuality or coming into their own. In “ ‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea,” 14-year-old Aisha and Tyche, her father’s colleague, send the goddess Hecate to torment teen idol Matyas Füst for beating a prostitute; in “A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society,” Aisha’s sister, Dayang, is a member of a women’s society at Cambridge University, waging a good-natured war against the Bettencourt Society, a rival all-male club. “Drownings” is an allegorical tale set in a dictatorship where citizens are “drowned in the gray marshlands deep in the heart of the country.” “Dornicka and the St. Martin’s Day Goose” is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, draw on Eastern European history and lore. And in “Presence,” a married couple in London undergo a pharmaceutical trial causing them to hallucinate a son they never had, a “makeless” boy. Readers will be drawn to Oyeyemi’s contagious enthusiasm for her characters and deep sympathy for their unrequited or thwarted loves. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency.

Ann Marie Gideon, Pieter Marek, and Bahni Turpin effortlessly adopt the voices of the narrators in each of these stories, despite their widely diverse plots and characters. Gideon lends the air of a fairy tale to "Books and Roses," which chronicles the adventures of a pair of estranged Spanish lovers. She also expertly captures the urgency of adolescent love in "Is Your Blood as Red as This?", in which a young girl vies for the heart of a talented puppeteer. Similarly, a stepfather's insecurities and an arsonist's delusions come across equally well in Marek's narrations of "Sorry Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea" and "Freddy Barendoff Checks In?" The adaptability of all three narrators enhances the effect of the stories' shared plot elements. M.F.R. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine