![]() (“ Perdita kept asking for gingerbread,” Oyeyemi writes in ominous italics. She learned to make gingerbread from her mother, Margot, and bakes it over and over again for her daughter, Perdita, who longs obsessively for it even after she’s diagnosed with celiac disease. What happens next is beside the point.īut in brief: Our chief gingerbread maker is Harriet Lee. To appreciate it is to read it more for those descriptions, for Oyeyemi’s shivery imagery and turns of phrase, than to find out what happens next. ![]() The true appeal of Gingerbread is in such eye-searing descriptions - of pastry turned blazing hot with vengeance and murder, so hot that it melts the spoon used to mix it and would, one has to imagine, ecstatically incinerate the tongue of the person who ate it. … That heart, ground to ash and shot through with darts of heat, salt, spice, and sulfurous syrup, as if honey was measured out, set ablaze, and trickled through the dough along with the liquified spoon.” ![]() Here’s a description in Gingerbread of the titular sweet: “It’s like noshing on the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they’d get away with it. Her books are filled with sentences of such precise and evocative language that reading them feels like being pricked by a thorny rose from a fairy tale. That’s because Oyeyemi’s books are rarely plot-driven: If anything is powering them forward, it’s the imagery. Trying to describe the plot of Gingerbread, the latest novel from Helen Oyeyemi, is a fool’s errand. ![]()
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