Gingerbread

This book was so dreamy and beautiful and had really lovely magical realism, it reminded me of Susan Sontag dreaminess and Sourdough by Robin Sloan rompy mystery and Angela Carter and also like a Wes Anderson movie somehow? Felt the most British of any of hers so far and I got a lot of Douglas Adams vibes. It's really cool to have both the gorgeous, surreal, amorphous magical language and storytelling with the dry British humor and to have these things blend so well.

I got the sense that she's letting herself be a little freer with the whims her sentences take, sometimes to understand something I'd have to kind of step back from it and try to see it without focusing on it, kind of like those trippy picture puzzles from the 90s where you unfocus your eyes and see an image in the chaos. It's really exciting to figure it out in Oyeyemi's writing because so much can come across at once this way.