A New New Me
Oyeyemi’s prose is propelled by a subtle animism; her sentences sometimes seem to contain the whole book in miniature ... Likely to scramble the senses. Genres and registers collide: her prose offers, in a single page, poetic candor, sly wit, dad jokes, and contemporary therapyspeak ... Some novels insist on being read as prescriptions for living; Oyeyemi’s simply depicts a process: one splinter of a soul briefly gains control of a body, and goes out to be engulfed by the world.
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Oyeyemi’s books are getting weirder — and I mean that in the best way ... Could be overwhelming, but Oyeyemi is such a confident writer, her details always specific and alive, that you know you’re in good hands even if you’re not entirely sure what material those hands are made of ... In addition to getting weirder, Oyeyemi’s novels have been getting funnier over the years, and her new-newest follows that trend ... Throughly enjoyable.
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Helen Oyeyemi’s fiction revels in the nimbleness of the human mind, its torrid relationships with language, its capacity for expansion and its ability to change, like a fish that can switch sexes if necessary ... She imbues her books with wit, delight and an endearing matter-of-factness in the face of the world’s absurdity and cruelty. This complex harmony is essential to Oyeyemi’s success: Her gentle but firm rejection of traditional boundaries would risk disorienting the reader if her voice were any less full-throated or enchanting.
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