by Helen Oyeyemi
Overall: White is for Witching is not for the faint of heart. Gothic, dark, and deeply unsettling, this book belongs right next to the works of Shirley Jackson. Miranda and Eliot are twins inhabiting a strange house inherited from their mother’s family which their father has converted into a bed and breakfast. In the absence of her mother, teenage Miranda develops pica, disordered eating in which someone consumes non-food items (chalk and plastic, in this case), and begins to change in other ways. Told from different points of view, including that of the house, as the story unfolds the reader goes ever deeper into a family’s secrets, dysfunction, and madness.
Likes: I like psychological horror (without much gore) and stories that incorporate elements of fairytales and folklore, all of which this book has in spades. There are tales of the soucouyant, a Caribbean legend about a monstrous old woman who wears a second skin and drinks blood; cursed apples; shoes left behind by a disappearing girl. My favorite character was Ore, Miranda’s college girlfriend (and victim?); the relationship between Ore and Miranda, and how new love can take on an almost vampiric cast, is beautiful and creepy. I thought that the shifts in narration worked very well to keep the reader off balance, emphasizing that everyone in the story is an unreliable narrator to a greater or lesser degree. And there is an underlying theme of racism and xenophobia that gives the story an even darker edge.
Dislikes: I’m all for ambiguity, but this might have pushed it a little far even for me. I’m still scratching my head weeks after finishing this one.
FYI: parental abandonment, murder, suicide, mental illness, disordered eating, racism, xenophobia, violence.
Liz Helfrich 