White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
4 star read
Why I read: Book Club pick for October.
Book blurb: “In a vast, mysterious house on the cliffs near Dover, the Silver family is reeling from the hole punched into its heart. Lily is gone and her twins, Miranda and Eliot, and her husband, the gentle Luc, mourn her absence with unspoken intensity. All is not well with the house, either, which creaks and grumbles and malignly confuses visitors in its mazy rooms, forcing winter apples in the garden when the branches should be bare. Generations of women inhabit its walls. And Miranda, with her new appetite for chalk and her keen sense for spirits, is more attuned to them than she is to her brother and father. She is leaving them slowly –
Slipping away from them –
And when one dark night she vanishes entirely, the survivors are left to tell her story.
“Miri I conjure you “
This is a spine-tingling tale that has Gothic roots but an utterly modern sensibility. Told by a quartet of crystalline voices, it is electrifying in its expression of myth and memory, loss and magic, fear and love.”
My review
Oyeyemi’s writing is magical. She beautifully crafts words together to create a dark gothic atmosphere. Words weave together, suggesting things, lyrically grasping at your imagination. The plot itself is bewildering and confusing. The narrative switches to different peoples viewpoints continuously and sometimes without any headers to indicate who we are now following. The plot seems to meander along, back and forth through time till you no longer know where you are. But somehow that works with the strange almost poetry of the words. Its a book to read and absorb the atmosphere from.
It’s a book about mental health, how reality and illusion blend together when the mind is fragmented. She captures the fragility of the mind wonderfully. The main character “Miri” has a form of Pica, an eating disorder, where she consumes chalk. She is a weird character, and I never felt like I got to know her. But that fit into the atmosphere of the book as it seemed like Miri did not know herself or what was going on.
I was disappointed that there weren’t any actual witches in the book given the title. The ending is left open so its not one for people who like all the loose ends tied neatly together in a book.
I’d recommend to anyone who likes: weird tales, atmospheric books, ghosts,
“I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching
****
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