But when Perdita goes missing and turns up catatonic in her own bed after eating gingerbread laced with something, Oyeyemi brings us into the family’s past, and into the tale of the Lee family’s emigration from a place known as Druhástrana. Perdita doles out affection and wrath according to typically opaque teenage whims. Margot dotes on her granddaughter, letting her skip school for spa days.

Harriet tries to get in good graces with the elite PTA at Perdita’s school by baking the group gingerbread from her family’s recipe. At first, they appear to be an ordinary London family, albeit one that is clever, a bit eccentric, and close-knit. The Lee family consists of Margot, the matriarch Harriet, her daughter and Perdita, Harriet’s seventeen-year-old. Gingerbread begins, as so many fairy tales do, with the introduction of a family. But if fairy tales are meant to show us the arbitrary rules that govern our living in this social world, Oyeyemi means to reveal the malleability of a person’s understanding of that world, especially their understanding of its pillars: relationships and money. In fact the question why does not often arise.” One reason for this strange rule is that fairy tales are very aware of the arbitrariness of the human-made world. This is writer and fairy tale scholar Kate Bernheimer’s description of what she calls intuitive logic she says, “the language of traditional fairy tales tells us that first this happened, and then that happened. The association of all events is ruled by narrative proximity rather than cause and effect. But this logic pervades even the everyday moments of fairy tales.

Most of us might immediately try to describe this logic in terms of magic: Cinderella’s carriage becoming a pumpkin at exactly midnight, or the random-feeling rules that limit Aladdin’s jinn-given wishes. There are a few different formal elements that some fairy tale scholars have described as being the sine qua non of fairy tales, one of which is strange logic. Mutable logic flows through every aspect of Gingerbread-plot, character, and space-revealing the flexibility of structures and worldviews that we normally see as rigid and immovable. Oyeyemi’s novel is a fairy tale not because it is moralizing, reductive, gooey, or pretty-to-think-so-it is a fairy tale because it captures the systems of the world, rather than the systems of the individual, and because it does this using the slippery and associative logic of the human mind. Not the Disney ones, of course, but not the rewrites, helpfully reminding us that “the originals are a lot darker,” either. This is because the tradition in which Helen Oyeyemi writes is not the modern literary novel-it is the fairy tale. It’s not a book that makes sense as a modern novel stylistically, character-wise, or narrative-wise.

Gingerbread book helen oyeyemi