White is for Witching

I've wanted to read this author for quite a while, but didn't know which book to start with. I am a sucker for houses on book covers and so I decided to start with this one. 'White is for Witching', reminded me a bit of two different books, the first being 'The Fall of the House of Usher' by Edgar Allan Poe and the second being 'Woman in the Walls' by Amy Luckavics.Let's start with the way the book is written, people have described it be lyrical and I have to agree. There's something soothing about reading a book that flows. Where the words on the page float like in a soft breeze. It's light and ethereal. I did sometimes day dream during the book, but not in a way because I was bored, but in a way where I was picturing the scenes and the scenes after.The book is about a house on the cliffs of Dover. A family home that has been passed down from mother to daughter in the Silver family. Lily Silver met Luc Dufresne at a Christmas party. They married had twins, a boy Eliot, and a girl Miranda. They moved into Lily's family home and turned it into a bed and breakfast. The family home or estate was quite large and could accommodate a few families at a time. The house is a character in this book and narrates. It keeps close watch on the Silver woman. Protects them.There is an attribute the Silver women share and that is Pica. Pica is a medical term for a particular kind of eating disorder. It's the eating of non-food items. Miranda or Miri, as she likes to be called, is partial to chalk. Her mother too used to eat chalk. Miranda is in a hospital for her eating disorder. Luc and her brother are hopeful she will grow out of it.If you've read 'The Fall of the House of Usher', then you'd know that the story is about a house and the twins that live within it. The house is decaying day by day. It keeps the twins prisoner in their own home. The sister is very sick. The brother is losing his mind. I've read several books over the years that had houses that watched it's occupants, 'Rooms' by Lauren Oliver for example. Although it is actually ghosts that are watching the family within, it feels the same. In 'Women in the Walls' by Amy Luckavics, the mother disappears like in this book and the daughter feels like the house has secrets. In 'House of Leaves' by Mark Danielewski the house itself can transform at will. Creating rooms where there was none. So reading White is for Witching felt similar and new at the same time.It's hard to explain what the book is about after reading it once. I feel like I must read it again to find the hidden meanings within the pages. On the back of the book it says, "The mazy house on the cliffs near Dover has been home to generations of Silver women-and it never lets them go." This is true. Somehow the women are stuck in the house. Whether that is as spirits I can not say.The book has several POV's. We listen to Miri, Eliot, Ore(a friend) and the house itself. They are all telling the story of Miri, her slow decent into madness? Maybe not. But they witness a change in Miri and one day she is gone. They don't know what happened to her. Only the house who watches everything knows. And so this is that story.I loved everything about this book. I gave it 4 stars because I definitely think I need to re-read it at some point in the future to get a better understanding of it. It has room to improve in my eyes on a second read. I highly recommend if you haven't picked up anything from Helen Oyeyemi. She writes dark fairy-tales and this one is eerie.

At first I found the story line confusing since it switches viewpoints between characters but one I got the rhythm it went well. It actually is not so much a ghost story as much as a story of depressive pain. The writing style is beautiful !

awesome

I am having trouble getting into this book.It COULD be that there is too much elsegoing on right now. :Looking forward totrying again

I devoured this in two sittings. Set in a large house in Dover, the two main narrators are twins, Eliot and Miranda Silver, who are in their late teens. The prologue opens with a series of fractured narratives – where we learn the girl, Miranda is missing.The characters are all painted vividly throughout this book and with each passing page, you want to lap up more. I found myself fascinated by each of the characters, where ordinary details usually passed over were lingered over by Oyeyemi. For instance, the father, Luc, who isn’t a major character in the book is still crystal clear in the reader’s mind. His introduction was:“He wooed his wife with peach tarts he’d learnt from his pastry father. The peaches fused into the dough, with their skins intact, bittered and sweetened by burnt sugar…His fingers are ruined by too close and careless contact with the heat; the parts that touch each other when the hand is held out straight and flat, the skin there is stretched and speckled and shiny. Lily had never seen such hands. To her they seemed the most wonderful in all the world.”And yes, it’s a story about food in part. The girl, Miranda suffers from the condition of Pica (eating things that aren’t food, such as chalk, soil, etc.)But the most interesting aspect of the story is the way in which the house impacts on the family. We come to learn that it has done so over the course of generations of Silvers.A little taster without spoiling hopefully:“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 at me.”A fascinating and spine-tingling read.

I read this enthralling and disquieting story while I was in NYC, which turned out to be ideal timing because I read it right before and immediately after my first momentous visit to Sleep No More. This book so beautifully complemented and fed the simultaneous dropping and parting of veils I’d just experienced. White is for Witching, by the time I got to it, came with quite a bit of hype, including naming Oyeyemi as Shirley Jackson‘s heir. In a way, I find this unfair. I’m a tremendous fan of Shirley Jackson, but I think Helen Oyeyemi has her own voice and style. Simply taken as a high compliment, however, I think it’s a beautiful statement. White is for Witching manages to be haunting from the very first while also being a wickedly slow burn of weirdness. It’s a ghost story. It’s a haunted house story. It’s a story of intergenerational trauma, institutional racism, familial bonds, friendship, love, hunger, and identity. I haven’t read anything else quite like it, which is one of the best things I can say about a book.

Told mostly by Miranda's twin, Eliot, White is For Witching explores the tragic tale of Miranda Silvers, the girl with pica, who is slowly fading away after the death of her mother, Lily. I say mostly, because parts of the novel are also told in a general narrator type POV, by the house (hah) as well as Miranda's friend, Ore. But mostly, it's Eliot's voice who dominates, Eliot who is both friend and enemy to his twin.Oyeyemi keeps you off balance throughout the book through POV changes, stylistic formatting changes, shifts and revelations within the text that sometimes blindside you. She starts with Miranda's disappearance, heads back to the past where it all began and then ends up back where she started: where is Miranda?This week's theme is on Place, so I'm guessing this book is significant because it uses place (the house on 29 Barton Road) as a character, as a persona that holds secrets and affects everything in Miranda's life. (Is Miranda truly crazy, mentally ill? Or is it the house or whatever spirit that lives in it the one that is doing things to her; this living house that claims all Silver women as hers? Who are the shadowy beings only Ore can see besides Miranda?)Dover seems like a small, white town, with a burgeoning immigration population. Is the racism seen (four immigrant boys slashed, killed; the house's rejection of Ore) something inherent in the house/its spirit or is it a projection of Miranda's subconscious? It's never settled who killed the boys, or why Tijana thinks it's Miranda, other than the fact that the last one, her cousin Agim, sees a slight resemblance between Miranda and his attacker.Cambridge is nothing more than a place where Miranda escapes to and meets Ore, where she separates herself from the house, where she slowly fades. But Miranda also seems to feed off Ore, in the same strange way Lily might have fed off Luc, though it's never clear, never explained. (Is it the soucouyant? What is Sade trying to ward off?)Nothing is clear. The narrators are unreliable, the main protagonist dead or missing, only seen through the eyes of those around her.A haunting, unsettling read.

Perhaps this just too clever for me or perhaps all the rave reviews are a case of the emperor's new clothes but I gave up about a quarter of the way in. I think there was some beautiful use of language and the author has a genuinely wonderful descriptive turn of phrase but I really didn't enjoy the way it was written moving from one narrator to another with no warning and no apparent chapters. I was immediately irritated by the way the book started as though I'd opened it halfway through and didn't have a clue what was going on as generally the job of the first chapter is to draw the reader in to find out more. I appreciate that may make sense by the end but I just found it too tedious trying to understand what was going on to waste time reading any further.

I picked this up as I'm immersing myself in all kinds of ghost stories just now (because I'm writing one myself). I confess I was over half way through before it finally grabbed me by the throat, but after that I was compelled to read on. It creates a weird, uncanny vibe which I found deliciously unsettling. I liked how suddenly we see characters from someone else's point of view, and they are not as we'd thought....literally, physically different. That sent a shiver through me. I loved the way the ghostly aspects were woven in so matter-of-factly. I was disappointed by the ending, but was also intrigued to find I immediately turned back to the start and reread the opening pages. These are the true ending, I feel. Overall, despite some frustrations with it, I found it a quirky, slightly challenging read, and I'd recommend it to those who like ghost stories.

Spellbinding, unique, wonderfully written, utterly unpredictable. I loved it.

A strange and beautiful book which I will be thinking about for a long time. There's so much in it, so much to consider, to absorb. Magical, spellbinding, I was bewitched.