Sometimes you open a book and such magic and wonder floods out of the pages, sweeping you up in a current as it washes you from your daily life to blissfully drown in its words. Helen Oyeyemi’s short story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is one of those books and reading it is quite possibly one of the best things to happen to me in 2020. A delicious ointment on the soul, Oyeyemi cleverly crafts nine stories loosely connected through recurring characters and thematic aspects such as lo...

One astonishing, gulp-it-down, re-read it for deeper truths story ('books and roses', the opener) then just a long, slow ride of WTF? and thoughts of "what am I missing?" told in beautiful but impenetrable prose. Phrases caught me repeatedly (although none that feel shareable out of context), but overall I just didn't have the key to this house. (You'll get the reference if you've read it.)-------------------I received an advanced reader's copy of this title from the publisher in exchange for an...

Some writers sideswipe you below the knees and knock you over. There you lie, breathless, with the world looking strange and incomprehensible, until you realize it's pretty amazing seeing ordinary things become extraordinary. That's as close as I can come to describing the experience of reading Helen Oyeyemi. I love her reliance on stories within stories which take her work to unexpected and untamed places. She seduces you so that when you finish reading you surface someplace unexpected that you...

Strange and surreal, What is Not Yours is Not Yours provokes thought and amazement at every turn. Across nine loosely interlocked tales a wide cast of characters, mostly queer and of color, navigate an alternate reality full of fantasy, violence, and desire. Teenaged puppeteers rapidly fall in and out of love with each other, a tyrant tries to literally drown out dissent in his kingdom, a son frets over taking his father’s place as maintenance man at a labyrinthine hotel. All the pieces are satu...

congratulations! semifinalist in goodreads' best fiction category 2016! books and roses"sorry" doesn't sweeten her teais your blood as red as this?drowningspresencea brief history of the homely wench societydornička and the st. martin's day goosefreddy barrandov checks ... in?if a book is locked there's probably a good reason for that don't you think

Some stories were great. Some, confusing.

Reading Helen Oyeyemi is like working out with a friendly but very aggressive personal trainer. At some point, you’re going to find yourself splayed out on the mat, panting like an animal and protesting that it’s too hard, you can’t do one more set. And then she'll blow her whistle in your face and cheerfully scream at you to get a move on. In much the same way as a good, hard workout eventually leads to an endorphin-fueled breakthrough, Oyeyemi’s short stories eventually clarified for me, and w...

The short stories in this collection are inherently weird, but Oyeyemi makes it work with her transformative, deeply moving, and well-crafted style. These are stories about a variety of characters—from different backgrounds, religions, ethnicities, sexualities—and I loved how certain characters were woven into each other's lives. Recognizing a character in a newly told tale and feeling connected to them for having known other parts of them in a previous story was the best feeling. And also impor...

This was my first read by Helen Oyeyemi, and it was definitely an interesting one. However, I must admit that her way of telling a story doesn't appeal strongly to me. Her stories are all entwined in some way, so that characters from one story suddenly appear in another, and that part was fine with me. It was the fact that her stories are quite messy and confusing that I didn't really like. I'm okay with open endings - I actually prefer them to closed endings - but I don't like it when the story...

Gave up. Really sorry, book clubbers. But, I'm gonna die one day, and I just can't waste my precious reading time on stuff that's trying so painfully hard to be weird and shocking.

3.5 StarsWeird, sometimes wonderful, but… just as often crazy-weird, as in if she was sitting across from me telling me these stories, I would either suspect she had taken some magical mystery tour courtesy of Timothy Lear’s medicine cabinet, or she needed drugs of another kind. “books and roses” – This was my favorite, and the reason I kept reading the remainder of the stories. What’s not to like about a story including a mysterious library and a locked garden? “A library at night is full of so...

Helen Oyeyemi may be one of the most imaginative writers working today so it is no surprise that her story collection astounds and amazes. Using the metaphorical (and often literal) conceit of keys, the stories tackle themes of discovery, connections, and belonging.The first story – my personal favorite – is entitled Books and Roses and reveals Ms. Oyeyemi at her finest. It begins (as do many in this collection) as a fabler: “Once upon a time in Catalonia a baby was found in a chapel.” As the st...

3.5I am so conflicted about this book. My overall impression is positive because Oyeyemi has one hell of an imagination and writes like a master storyteller. Yet there were many instances when I felt hopelessly lost. Each story has a strong start, is wonderfully absurd and rich in details, but the endings are too vague. Most stories don't even end really - they veer off into tangent after tangent, then meander into nothingness. It's like watching someone swim around in circles for a long time be...

Instagram || Twitter || Facebook || Amazon || PinterestThere are two kinds of literature in the world: the kinds that make sense & the kinds that don't. In recent years, the kind of literature that don't make sense have become popular, lining the shelves in hipster bookstores, as devoted hipster-lit aficionados have long arguments about "what the author really meant." (And don't tell me that Helen Oyeyemi isn't hipster-lit, because I was in a hipster bookstore recently, & she had an entire d

Alright...I'm a legitimate fan now!Boy, Snow, Bird is the only other work of hers that I've read and it left me sort of indifferent and slightly put off. This collection takes all of the whimsy and unpredictable elements of that novel and the result is a beautiful and playful mess of storytelling that impressed me from the first story to the last. Oyeyemi's writing is pure joy, and enchantment; surprise and haze; clarity and impressionism. You can NEVER predict where the stories will go; they ne...

I love, love, loved Mr. Fox. I did not love this one quite as much, but I did like it quite a bit. It's about the ghosts of connection and missed opportunities and prejudice and metaphors that are more real than reality. It's about people who love shadows, people who are trying to understand and getting in their own way, people who can't quite trust and are eaten up inside. It's got modern issues without ever being about "modern life" in an annoying way, it stays mythic and has a wide ranging le...

| | blog | tumblr | ko-fi | | “A library at night is full of sounds: The unread books can’t stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.” Confusion galore! What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is a relentlessly inventive and delightfully playful collection of interlocked short stories. These intentionally bewildering fabulist stories are inhabited by off-kilter characters who find themselves in increasingly fantastical scenarios. Magical keys, doors, pu...

This is a collection of short stories, each with interesting and somewhat magical settings that are refreshing and fun to read. However, I found myself a little lost in some of the stories wondering how I missed a turn here and a clue there, and my biggest problem with the tales is that they didn't end with quite the umph I imagined or wanted.A few concepts that describe some of the action: puppets that come alive, orphans left with benefits, evil rulers, female lovers, magical lands, dreams tha...

bigarurre: "a medley of sundry colors running together" and/or "a discourse running oddly and fantastically, from one matter to another"I was mesmerized by Oyeyemi's dizzying imagination from the start. Her stories flow seamlessly and morph into unexpected shapes within the turn of a sentence. You come to think you're reading about an abandoned baby left at a monastery, but by then you're following the life of a laundress, getting lost in a library where books whisper and rustle in the night, an...

3.5 stars rounded down to 3.A somewhat mixed but still magical bag from Helen Oyeyemi. Although her prose is memorable and unparalleled and her ability to craft a story is a thing of wonder, there's always a severe degree of disconnect from her narrative that keeps the reader from being fully immersed - something where the pieces are all there on the page, all the key elements of a good story, but it leaves me wanting something more, a more tangible way of understanding the motives of her charac...