First impressions review: Gingerbread, by Helen Oyeyemi
This story is very difficult to describe except as "enchanting". It clearly belongs to the Magical Realism style along with books like 'The House of the Spirits' and 'The Master and Margarita'. The tale centers on three generations of a family: Harriet Araminta Lee1, her mother Margot, and her teenage daughter Perdita. There is something a bit "witchy" about these women - their prematurely grey hair, their family recipe for gingerbread that sometimes has odd effects, Perdita's collection of doll-plant hybrids that talk - but they neither directly identify as witches nor even note that there is anything unusual about their family.
At the beginning of the book the Lees are living in London but Margo and Harriet reputedly come from Druhástrana, an island not noted on maps or acknowledged as real by any country except the Czech Republic. Harriet is a kind woman who teaches night classes in literature. She feels frequently ignored and overlooked, especially by the other members of the Parental Power Association at her daughter's school, who are immune even to her gingerbread. She sometimes dreams of reuniting with her childhood friend Gretel. Well, I say 'friend'...Given that the first time she imagines Gretel might be at the door, when Harriet is eating a piece of shortbread, she thinks "Gretel would have leaned forward and drawn it into her own mouth with her greeting kiss - soft lips, sharp teeth. And then she would have said 'More'", it is safe to say there are some feelings besides friendship there.
Then Harriet comes home to find Perdita unconscious, having made and eaten a batch of gingerbread with some strange additive. When the girl regains consciousness and the ability to speak, she says she made the drugged confection so that she could travel to Druhástrana and find Gretel. This sounds like nonsense, until she hands her mother a ring, the twin of the one Harriet used to wear on her own ring finger. So she sits down to tell Perdita and the overly-opinionated dolls about their homeland, and Gretel, and Perdita's father, and how it all ties back to the rich and eccentric Kercheval family.
One of the things that makes this story hard to describe is the way it twists around and subverts your expectations of where it is going, or even what is real. I can't say too much without spoiling it, but one of the bits I enjoyed was the way it seemed to be setting up one of those tiresome love triangles around Harriet - will she choose the dangerous bad boy, or the sweet, safe guy? - and then basically upends everything that goes along with that trope. The people of Druhástrana are all black, so far as I can tell, but they have a mix of names from across the world that makes one wonder about the country's history: besides the Lees and Kerchevals, there are characters with names like Atif Cook, Jiaolong Parker, and Oskar Procházka. Even the time period in which the story takes place is ambiguous. The "current" timeline would seem to be present day...but Harriet as a teenager had a cell phone. So is the "current" part of the story actually in the future? It doesn't matter, of course - this is a fairytale. But it contributes to the feeling that reality is shifting under your feet as you explore this world.
One aspect that is slightly frustrating is the social commentary. Not that it exists; In fact, I agree with most of it. For instance, Harriet thinks about her adult students:
Most...arrive from jobs as cleaners and builders and nail technicians...Every member of this class is under the impression that they are thick, and every single one of them is the opposite.
Druhástrana, though something of a fairytale kingdom, is a highly unequal, highly controlled society. The peasant families like the Lees know that their whole life's labor is going to build, say, a single rose window for a rich person who will never know their name, or care to know it. Margot is especially aware of this because:
...she'd been born into a wealthy family that had got rich off the barely solvent. That's what was behind her demands to know why they toiled and toiled without profit; she knew a racket when she saw it.
Themes of economic inequality keep coming back again and again. Indeed, a Druhástranian textbook tells Harriet that her country divorced itself from formal international relations because the residents had objected to:
...foreigners who kept coming in and trying to propagate distracting inequalities, stuff about physical appearance and who people should and should not fancy, and places of prayer that were better than others... What Druhástranians wanted was to keep things simple and concentrate on upholding financial inequality.
However, the conclusion of the book seems to veer away from these structural or societal issues entirely, which felt a bit odd. Then again, having the story end by somehow fixing capitalism would have felt a bit odd too, and the various redemptions and happy endings were satisfying on a personal level.
1. Not that it plays directly into the story, but this character seems to be named after Harriet Tubman, whose birth name was 'Araminta'.
2. Well, it isn't clear if the Kerchevals are all Druhástranian, but the Lees are related to them.
Overall recommendation: If you like magical realism, and want a modern take on the style with a diverse cast of distinctive, well-written characters, definitely check this one out.
