Oyeyemi’s potent imagination supplies clinics where dieters are put to sleep in order to wake up thinner three days later (“‘sorry’ doesn’t sweeten her tea”), puppets with human emotions (“is your blood as red as this?”), married psychologists whose experiments stop time (“presence”) and a cruel dictatorship in which those drowned by the king live on in the marshes (“drownings”). One character describes the compulsive power of a good book: “I read without stopping until the end, as if somebody were chasing me through the pages with a butcher’s knife.” Flashes of deadpan humour crop up frequently: a pregnant woman recalls her lover observing, “‘Babies are so …’ and I thought he was going to say something poetic but he finished: ‘expensive’.”Ī creepy pop star sings “with a vocal tone reminiscent of post-coital whispers”. Early on in the book, one character quotes from an archaic poem: “It may wele ryme but it accordith nought.” This proves unfortunate foreshadowing, as Oyeyemi’s technically elegant writing ultimately amounts to more style than substance.Īs far as style goes, there are plenty of enjoyable moments. Oyeyemi plays with a legend in which lovers exchange books and roses on a particular day correspondingly, the bequest of a whole library and a meeting in a garden of roses suggest a supremely great love.īut Oyeyemi’s disparate symbols, dream-states and fragmented narratives fail to add up so tidily in most of the other stories.

The story of Montse, an abandoned baby bearing a golden key, intertwines with that of the beautiful thief Lucy, whose lover also sends her a key, and the twin narratives dance around each other until merging in a romantic climax. The collection’s strongest tale is its opening one, “books and roses”, partly because the symbolism of keys and locks has yet to become heavy-handed.

On one level, this conjures an effect of ethereal beauty and unexpected humour, especially in the tension between Oyeyemi’s otherworldly tone and contrastingly matter-of-fact observations, but, as the book wears on, meaning becomes increasingly elusive amid the narrative mazes.

What is not yours is not yours summary