Helen Oyeyemi's GINGERBREAD (Narr by the author)

Once I thought I had a hard and fast rule that no novel narrated for its audio edition by its author could be as good as one narrated by a professional narrator.* But that was before I heard the soft, sweet, not quite-childlike but nearly child-pitched tones of Afro-Surrealist (and possibly Post-Exotic) queen Helen Oyeyemi. I've immensely enjoyed settling down each night to let her tell me the weird and wonderful bedtime story** that is Gingerbread.

Caveat auditor/caveat lector, though: you're likely to wake up the next morning with a fierce craving for the titular treat. Myself, I prefer sliced from nice loaf, with a good glop or two of lemon curd, over the biscuit/cookie variey, but you do you. 

Anyway, this magical, disturbing and bizarre little novel, what?

We first encounter our triple protagonists***, Margot Lee, her daughter Harriet and her granddaughter Perdita, in plain old 21st century Yorkshire. The younger two share a flat on the top floor of a seven-storey house far too old and ill-regarded to have an elevator. Margot lives elsewhere; we don't find out for a while where,  but it's just as banal a setting as the flat. So far, so dull. 

How we meet them, though, is through Harriet's famous-or-infamous gingerbread, her primary means of communication with her fellow humans. If she is courting you,  or worried that you're angry with her, or suspects you and she are in any way at odds, she will present you with a tin of what a "gingerbread addict" once described to her as tasting like Revenge:

It’s noshing on the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they’d get away with it,’ the gingerbread addict said. ‘That heart, ground to ash and shot through with dars of heat, salt, spice, and sulfurous syrup, as if honey was measured out, set ablaze, and trickled through the dough along with the liquefied spoon.

"You are phenomenal. You have ruined my life forever, " the addict had continued."Thank you."

Now, I make a pretty great loaf of gingerbread (and am pretty good at fruit curds, too) but nobody has compared it to a feeling that satisfying. So, first of all, goals. And second of all...

It's this really just a book about baked goods? And if so, wouldn't that be a bit, I dunno, cozy for a book covered here at Kate of Mind?

Oh, ye of little faith!

For the Lee family, at least two generations of them as we know to start, are not native to Yorkshire. Or to England. They might be said to be natives to Europe, but only if your idea of Europe can stretch to accommodate possibly imaginary, or at least notional countries that at one point were officially recognized by just four other nations in the world, but now maintain any kind of relations at all only with the Czech Republic. Such is Druhástrana, a land where one may be sentenced to public execution for unspecified crimes but where few actually die this way, because a stay is granted if one of the spectators at the event of imminent death agrees to take full legal and moral responsibility for the criminal in future by marrying them. For instance. 

This is how the Lee family got its start, when Margot impulsively volunteered to wed a very handsome crook -- despite the fact that she had observed him to be weirdly in cahoots with another female spectator. Before we know it, the not very happy pair, Margot, the daughter of a fabulously rich family of dubious scruples, and her formerly condemned bridegroom, are reduced to eking out a living on some rather poor farmland and living in a rather poor house, but welcoming a beautiful daughter, Harriet. And then, before we know it -- but that would be telling. You see, there are many mysteries behind Harriet's talent for gingerbread and her recipe, and of how Perdita came to exist at all. And these are the mysteries we are here to explore alongside Perdita as she embarks on a mission of discovery via... baking up a batch of her mother's famous gingerbread with an extra, unknown but possibly psychoactive ingredient, eating it all up and... slipping into a coma? Surrounded by the apparently sentient but laconic combinations of dolls and houseplants that have grown up alongside her while guarding the corners of her four-poster bed?

Well, yes. What part of "Afro-surrealist" would possibly lead you to expect a standard and cozy book about baking? That would be boring. And Oyeyemi, while she sounds gentle and soothing and only slightly amused as she narrates her tale, is not here to bore anybody, least of all herself.

Also, that whiff of fairy tales that a title like Gingerbread gives off for most of us? That's no accident, and one in particular is evoked by the name of Harriet's sly and not entirely well- meaning best friend, whose faintly flour-dusted fingerprints turn out to be all over the middle Lee generation's life, and thus those of her mother and daughter as well. 

Along the way through this story of mother's and daughters and gingerbread, Oyeyemi has left odd little ambushes of insight that wait to attack us like packs of wolves, or wolf pups at least. An "authenticity theme park" full of ersatz gingerbread girls here, a professor with wise bons mot about the writing of Emile Zola there, a lesson or two about what we will and will not accept in exchange for doing what we do better than anyone else around another corner... and, strangest and most confrontational of all, the idea of a near-utopia in which every kind of equality between people prevails except for economic equality. People may get bored with lives in which sexes, races, religions, sexualities, degrees or attractiveness or physical ability or intelligence are all on a level playing field, the land of Druhástrana seems to have concluded, as long as the chance of "unexpected abundance" (often in the form of some kind of lottery winnings) is present. Would that be so? Oyeyemi doesn't give us the answer to that; we must decide for ourselves. 

All this and at least one seriously adorably funny sex scene!

I have but one complaint about Gingerbread, and that's about the ending, which throws in several intriguing but unexplored new plot elements and characters at us by way of teasing a still-to-come reunion between Harriet and her old Druhástranian friend and on the whole feel like they've come from some other book entirely. It's a book I'd very much like to read someday, but I don't feel like it was a great way to end this one. 

Nonetheless, I've added the rest of Oyeyemi's output to date to my endless TBR, and will look forward to new work from her with anticipation and pleasure, like a freshly baked loaf of something dark and complex and delicious straight out of the oven. 

*Though one must always make allowances for the likes of Podiobooks and any similar efforts by aspiring authors who are trying everything they can to get attention for their beloved book babies, especially nowadays. Too many authors who have truly enriched my life got their starts that way, and some, like Scott Sigler, have never abandoned this practice. 

**If you're OK with tripping balls in your dreams that night. 

***Played in my imagination by 1980s-era Joan Plowright as Margot Lee, Juliette Stephenson as Harriet Lee, and Joely Richardson as Perdita Lee, because I spent many years with only a handful of movies on VHS to my name and my very favorite, watched until it wore out, was Peter Greenaway's Drowning By Numbers, a film I still haven't tired of, by the way! And yes, the text makes clear early on that the Lee women have "pearl gray hair and bark-brown skin" but I couldn't help it. Once the idea leaked into my head, it couldn't be budged.