what is not yours is not yours by helen oyeyemi

This loose, multiracial, polymorphously perverse, generation-spanning cast lives mostly in present-day England, but they have roots elsewhere. Most of the rest of the stories in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours are linked, with major characters in one story later turning up as minor characters in another.

“Her greatest material treasure was an egregiously shiny bit of tin she’d won at a fairground coconut shy this fact can’t be denied.” “Her taste lacked refinement,” she remarks of the foundling, now grown into a laundress named Montserrat. Then there’s the utter confidence of Oyeyemi’s voice and the way it dips into a conversational mode every now and then to make you feel as if you’ve been waved into a gossipy circle to get the real lowdown. Oyeyemi’s new short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, contains nine tales, the first of which begins, “Once upon a time in Catalonia a baby was found in a chapel.” Hardly innovative, those familiar four words followed by that mysterious foundling, but there’s a reason why old wives have been using such devices for centuries: They work. (Mar.The most gifted writers-and the precocious British author Helen Oyeyemi, barely into her 30s with five novels and two plays to her name, is one of them-have their tricks for conquering this inertia, and some of the best tricks are old ones. Readers will be drawn to Oyeyemi’s contagious enthusiasm for her characters and deep sympathy for their unrequited or thwarted loves. And in “Presence,” a married couple in London undergo a pharmaceutical trial causing them to hallucinate a son they never had, a “makeless” boy. Martin’s Day Goose” is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, draw on Eastern European history and lore. “Drownings” is an allegorical tale set in a dictatorship where citizens are “drowned in the gray marshlands deep in the heart of the country.” “Dornicka and the St. In “ ‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea,” 14-year-old Aisha and Tyche, her father’s colleague, send the goddess Hecate to torment teen idol Matyas Füst for beating a prostitute in “A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society,” Aisha’s sister, Dayang, is a member of a women’s society at Cambridge University, waging a good-natured war against the Bettencourt Society, a rival all-male club. Loosely linked by a theme of keys and doors, many of the stories feature female protagonists discovering their sexuality or coming into their own. In her first story collection, Oyeyemi ( Boy, Snow, Bird) conjures present-day Europe, made enticingly strange by undercurrents of magic, and populated by ghosts, sentient puppets, and possible witches alongside middle-aged psychiatrists, tyrants, and feminist undergrads.

What is not yours is not yours by helen oyeyemi