Reviews with content warning for Suicide attempt - White is for Witching

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White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

5 reviews

traa's review

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dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

sofipitch's review against another edition

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dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

This was fantastic. Oyeyemi is so clearly talented, she can bend prose styles and narrative around her in ways that I hadn't seen before. This was a wonderful gothic, inheritance and love shown at their worst and most possessive. I've read a fair amount of modern gothics and I feel like authors either get the genre or they don't but this one GOT it.

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aisabel's review

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challenging dark mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

Beautiful prose, confusing plot. Very unsatisfying ending, but I might still reread it to better appreciate it.

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ceallaighsbooks's review

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

“‘…Please to tell a story about a girl who gets away.’
‘Gets away from what, though?’
‘From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn’t really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like happy and good will never find her.’
‘You don’t want her to be happy and good?’
‘I’m not sure what’s really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin.’”

TITLE—White is for Witching

AUTHOR—Helen Oyeyemi

PUBLISHED—2009

PUBLISHER—Picador

GENRE—literary gothic horror, dark academia

SETTING—Devon, England

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—sentient/haunted house, twins & siblinghood, Snow White, boutique hotel, soucouyant, mental illness, Haiti, Dover, familial legacy & inherited trauma, university life, immigration, photography, English xenophobia & racism, changelings

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

STORY/PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

BONUS ELEMENT/S—This book truly gets better and better with every reread. 🥰

PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Still, I wondered if the salt and pepper were really necessary—they seemed too cruel when it would be easier to despatch her by blowing out her flame before it grew, or by holding a mirror up to her wrinkled face and saying, ‘I don’t believe in you.’ But then, maybe ‘I don’t believe in you’ is the cruellest way to kill a monster.”

My thoughts:

This is my third read of this book and it’s so damn good I just truly don’t know how Oyeyemi writes like this: “…the place was almost friendly, like being carried on salt water towards yourself.” or “…I smoked both our gollies, with narrowed eyes and nervous intensity, like a Beat poet facing out his typewriter at dawn.” or “She threw rose attar over herself in a hasty splash, as if it were a liquid jacket.” or “Looking at those last photos was like flipping through a book of silence, all the information conveyed with the certainty of a glimpse.”

This is why Helen Oyeyemi is my alltime favorite writer. No one writes like her. I never get tired of reading her writing. I could open any of her books to any page and just start reading and struggle to put it down again. I could read and reread it over and over again forever. If I had to only ever read one writer’s work for the rest of my life it would be the easiest choice in the world. *happy sigh* Just grateful for her and her work. 😊🙏🏻

I would recommend this book to readers who are interested in trying one of Oyeyemi’s works and enjoy darker themes and imagery.

“Miranda went down barefoot, like Eurydice. She walked with her fingers spread over her face, because no one must see.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CW // eating disorder, suicidal ideation, racism & xenophobia (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—

everything else by Helen Oyeyemi
THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, by Shirley Jackson
TELL ME I’M WORTHLESS, by Alison Rumfitt
BABEL, by RF Kuang
the original “Snow White”
ALICE IN WONDERLAND, by Lewis Carroll
Gwendolyn Brooks

Favorite Quotes—

“Incongruous smiles were a sort of nervous thing with Miranda, a way of protecting herself from consequences, I think. Just like putting sunglasses on, or opening up an umbrella.”

“There was a change in the shadows and I twisted around, looking into the corners where the lamplight cracked. Miri is the older twin. Maybe she has seen things that craned their necks to look at her and then withdrew before I was born, thinking that to consider one of us is to consider both.”

“Why do people go to these places, these places that are not for them? It must be that they believe in their night vision. They believe themselves able to draw images up out of the dark. But black wells only yield black water.”

“Miranda.

Look at me.

Will you not?

It is useful, instructive, comforting to know that you are not alone in your history.

So I have done you good

and now,

some harm.”

“He’d pulled the green ribbon down through Miranda’s ponytail, tied it around his sleeve and said to her, ‘I’m your knight.’ Miranda pushed him. He took a single step back and scowled. Miranda said loudly, ‘I’m Morgan La Fay—I’ve got spells and I can stick up for myself.’”

“In a psychomantium, glass topples darkness. Things appear as they really are, people appear as they really are. Visions are called from a point inside the mirror, from a point inside the mind. Miranda looked in.”

“It was a dress to be worn by the sort of girl who’d check that no one was looking, then skip down a quiet street instead of walking, just so the fun of it was hers alone.”

“…she didn’t know where the thought had come from, she probably had to be careful because she had been mad.”

“…someone who had lived in a different house from her when she’d thought they were all living in the same house, safe as little fishes in folds of the deep blue sea.”

“‘I miss her. So much that sometimes I’m scared I’ll bring her back.’”

“‘…Then when you were three, your GrandAnna had a crack-up. A… well, a really big crack-up, and she had to go into a home. You wouldn’t remember,’ Lily said.

…

’GrandAnna’s crack-up. It was like the heraldic pelican,’ Miri said. ‘…The bird that pecks itself to death to feed its children. She tried to give us her blood but we didn’t want it.’

…

‘There is nothing… mysterious and Gothic about a crack-up. If anything it’s just… sad.’ Lily was so angry she was almost singing, her temper changing the stress she put on her words. ‘There is no need to make up stories about it.’”

“How dare people sleep, how dare they lie so blankly in the dark?”

“The skull was temporary, the skull collected the badness together and taught it discipline, that was all.”

“I know of witches who whistle at different pitches, calling things that don’t have names.”

“White is for witching, a colour to be worn so that all other colours can enter you, so that you may use them. At a pinch, cream will do.”

“…the soucouyant, the wicked old woman who flies from her body and at night consumes her food, the souls of others—soul food!—in a ball of flame. At dawn she returns to her body, which she has hidden in a safe place. I read to the walls. ‘Kill the soucouyant.’ Dawn tore a rosy line through the clouds. ‘Find her skin and treat it with pepper and salt. How it burns her, how it scratches her. Only the night gives her her power, and if she is unable to re-enter her body by sunrise, she cannot live. Kill the soucouyant, that unnatural old lady, and then all shall be as it should.’”

“As always, the soucouyant seemed more lonely than bad. Maybe that was her trick, her ability to make it so you couldn’t decide if she was a monster.”

“The night didn’t listen to us—it had a noise of its own…”

“…to whom I couldn’t write ‘I love you’ because I meant it angrily and she would know.”

“I am lucky, in her GrandAnna’s mountains hand. She was lucky. Had it been the fifties, her father wouldn’t be taking her home from here, he’d be dropping her off at a clinic that specialized in electroshock therapy. She’d be on her way to the gag and ball.”

“It was like dancing with a mask that was attached to a stick—she dared not lower it, no matter how tiring it was to hold the mask up.”

“These are the things that happen while you’re not looking, when you’re not keeping careful watch. When clear water moves unseen a taint creeps into it—moss, or algae, salt, even. It becomes foul, undrinkable. It joins the sea.”

“I told her about the soucouyant. While telling her I realized that the story of her is much more to do with how she is ended than how she began. We know that the soucouyant has preyed on younger souls for years and years, longer than anyone can remember. It’s as if she’s so wrong that even in the mind of the storyteller she must be killed immediately.”

“Miranda Silver was not, could not be herself plus all her mothers.”

“When she opened her mouth her teeth lifted, then sliced her bottom lip again. She couldn’t see the teeth, only the cuts they made. But she felt the teeth. Her features couldn’t accommodate the length of them, they were her skeleton extended.”

Content Warnings

headachesince03's review

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

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