Rating: 2* of fiveThe Publisher Says: As a child, Miranda Silver developed pica, a rare eating disorder that causes its victims to consume nonedible substances. The death of her mother when Miranda is sixteen exacerbates her condition; nothing, however, satisfies a strange hunger passed down through the women in her family. And then there’s the family house in Dover, England, converted to a bed-and-breakfast by Miranda’s father. Dover has long been known for its hostility toward outsiders. But t...

i read this. i'm not sure how to review it. like the other things i have read by her, she shows a great flair for foreboding and atmosphere but the end is a void. i'm not sure what this book is. it's not a traditional story, it's kind of fairy-tale-like, but even that... there are characters who are involved heavily, and then they are absent from the narrative, never to return. i guess in that way, it is like the real-life situation of never knowing when the last time you will see someone will b...

A lyrical book about a house that keeps its women captive. Miri has pica: the name for an urge to eat things that aren't food. Throughout the book we follow her downward spiral, through deep illness to attempted revelry at university, alongside her twin brother and widow father.It's an interesting book. At first, the stilted chapters and flow of chapters had me a little hooked, but by the end they become boring and a little tedious to work out whom is narrating each little bit. Perhaps the who d...

Sometimes when I'm reading a book, it's so out there that it makes me feel stupid. I think, "I bet a city woman on a subway would understand this thing." Or at least fake it. I can see this book being the subject of coffee table chatter at cocktail hour or at a ivy league campus book club, but not anywhere close to Paris, Illinois. Why? Because it's darn confusing. There are three narrators--Minerva, a yougn lady who suffers from pica (eating stuff like clay and chalk), Ore, a girlfriend Minerva...

Okay, I finished this. It was only 200 pages or so. I read another one by her that I liked a bit better. Both books have lovely cover art and great titles, the other book was Boy, Snow, Bird. This one has a creepy house which is given a voice in the narrative which I really liked. Basically it is about a haunted house which likes to keep its female owners around itself even after death and encouraged said women to hasten their deaths. Narrative structure and clarity is not to be found here altho...

White is for Witching is a strange but rather beautiful book. It's a story about lots of things - the fragility of family relationships, the bond between twins, sexuality, racial prejudice - but at the same time it isn't really about any of these. The unfinished themes are held together by Oyeyemi's prose, which is fluid, lyrical and reads almost like poetry at some points. The narrative is unconventional and initially hard to follow, as it switches between different viewpoints without explainin...

Strange and unusual with a malevolent house as a narrator. I have to admit I had a hard time finding my footing with this one and I never truly understood what was happening which made me happy to put it down and a struggle to pick it back up. It took me over a week to finish this very short book. At least it was a library book. 2 stars!

I was very close to putting this book down as I wasn't getting on with it at all, but I stuck with it and soon found myself falling head over heels!This one follows the Silver family who run a bed and breakfast in Dover - Luc and the twins, Miranda and Eliot. You soon learn that Lily (the wife and mother) has passed away. Not only has this caused strife within the family, the house appears to be reacting as well. We soon learn that generations of the Silver family women are living within the wal...

In White is for Witching the classic Gothic story of a haunted house is given new life, but keeps being just as unsettling and dark as the older ones.Despite what the title suggests, this book doesn’t contain any witches. It’s the eerie and intriguing tale of a young teenage girl named Miranda ‘Miri’ Silver who moves with her twin brother Elliot and her father into a new house after the death of her mother. That old house in Dover has been in the Silver family for generations, and while her brot...

OH THANK GOD ITS FINALLY OVER First of all, THIS BOOK FRUSTRATED THE CRAP OUT OF ME. It felt like it was trying SO hard to be eerie and suspenseful when in reality it was just straight up confusing. I can't immerse myself in your story if I have ZERO idea what's going on in it. Please don't hurl random occurrences at my face and expect me to feel creeped out; that is not how you create ambiance, creepy or otherwise. Character-wise, this book was also a complete disaster. Miranda is (supposed to...

This is the first book I'd read by Helen Oyeyemi, and I instantly had to purchase everything else. Girl has a way with words, a way with weird, and a way with witching. It kills me, full on kills me that she is writing like this and she's only, dear god, 26 years old. (And moan, I think she wrote this one when she was 23.) I'd possibly die of jealousy, except that she's completely amazing, and you know what? It's in the world's interest to have writers this good working in it. I think Oyeyemi is...

“I am here, reading with you. I am reading this over your shoulder. I make your home home, I’m the Braille on your wallpaper that only your fingers can read–I tell you where you are. Don’t turn to look at me. I am only tangible when you don’t look.”- The house in Helen Oyeyemi’s “White is For Witching”Although I bought an Oyeyemi book a few years ago, this is actually the first book of hers that I’ve read. I really enjoyed it although reading the review from the Toronto Star that referred to O

“ Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.”So... I’m not too sure how to rate this book... I can’t say I enjoyed it but to say it was a bad book would be equally as big a lie. This is probably not going to be a coherent review, but more “thoughts on paper”, so feel free to skip this one if you’re looking for a proper review.This was confusing, yet somehow entrancing, strange, yet somehow familiar and had little plot as far as I could descern. That all pales in comparison to my dominant fe...

3.75 starsAny fans of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House might want to put Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching on their radar! Or really any fans of any books where a house plays a major role - Rebecca, Salem’s Lot, you get the idea..It’s quite a chilling little book, following twin brother and sister as they try to move on from their home in Devon which their father attempts to run as a guesthouse, onto university, even though they’re both still struggling with the death of their mo...

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.” This is a quote by Angela Carter that's totally unrelated to this book, but that still fits the themes of the story absolutely perfectly in my opinion.White is for Witching is a very weird, often times confusing, but ultimately very satisfying read about a haunted house and essentially, a haunted girl. Even though the story has variou...

This book just absolutely blew me away! It is fabulously dark and sinister and at certain points I could feel the hair on my arms rising and it was the most delicious feeling. The story starts off seemingly innocent and almost like a fairytale but the descent into darkness and horror happens quickly and it swept me right off my feet. I was anxiously turning the pages, my mouth in a permanent “O” as I was reading, simultaneously fascinated and horrified. I wasn’t expecting to fall madly in love w...

This book is gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.As dark as its title is not; haunting is the most useful word to describe it. Oyeyemi is an incredible writer, though in some ways you have to be in the mood for it. Luscious prose that slips in and out of lucidity, characters that are bent and torn and broken yet iron-cored strong. There is no reliable narrator here. There are multiple possibilities for an ending, but the most satisfying one is where all attachment to this physical, mundane, three-dimen...

I feel really guilty that I didn't review this sooner—it's three months ago that I read it, and already most of it has faded, leaving only a shimmer of a disturbing dark magical feeling. Which, now that I write it out, is fairly apt: this book gets a million stars for its knock-out language and harrowing captivation, but I just never really felt like I understood what it all meant.Our heroine (such as she is) is Miranda Silver, a gothic waif with swirling dark hair who stumbles about in stiletto...

Bewildered. Confused. Empty. I was never able to find the rhythm of this. The groove. There were times I did, but I lost it. It was hazy. It slipped away. Sometimes I lost who the narrator was, I had to go back to find him/her/it. Sometimes I lost the time we were in. Maybe it has to to with the stopped watch. Maybe the house was playing tricks on me. Again I had to go back to find it, the time. All this going back was made easy by the delicious sentences. But in the end even those sentences did...