In the plotline of this novel Margot and her daughter Harriet Lea live on the island of Druhastrania. Much of the economy is agricultural and many people including the Leas live in virtual poverty. To offset this one of the wealthy Kercheval owners sets up a factory to produce Gingerbread and sell it through a Gingerbread Experience Facility. Young teenagers, including Harriet, are employed to live in the facility, make gingerbread, but also to act as decorative “props” in the public sales area. When Harriet leaves she and her mother are transported to England. Arriving there – in Whitby of all places – they find themselves the recipients of the “annual good deed” of another branch of the Kercheval family. As an illegal immigrant Margot tries to gain independent employment, Harriett grows & is educated. But pregnant she is at threat from the family and they need to flee, ending up in London.
Harriet will continue to make gingerbread and use it to reach out to other people as she tries to build a new adult life in an alien place. Her daughter Perdita is born. As a teenager she goes missing and returns unable to talk. As recovery therapy Harriet will tell her the story of her life in both Druhastrania and then in Whitby with the Kerchevals in great detail. Having heard of her background Perdita will then try and seek out her father building new links with the Kercheval family.
But this novel is by Oyeyemi so it cannot be a simple story. it is embellished into a fairy tale – a book length tale. Expect the story-telling to be the most important thing with fully depicted places, ambience and the need to suspend disbelief to let in wilder aspects of reality. But in addition you will be presented with complicated family life both good and evil through ordinary events and virulent discord. It will consider responsibility at the simple level of the individual action but to the wider community around over a life time. Harriet will have to come to terms with that you live your own life so you are responsible for it and how it develops. You might need to make personal choices, possibly taking risky actions and not just reacting to what life gives.
Oyeyemi is a brilliant story teller her images are visual, busy and multi-layered. The density of ideas and experiences need savouring slowly. But she writes so well even the “other” seems true. But importantly the whole tale is quietly but deeply sympathetic asking the reader deep moral questions. A compelling and thought provoking read.

This is imaginative, original, if oblique, absurdist and meandering storytelling from Helen Oyeyemi, a family drama, of friendship, class, and an inheritance of a long held traditional family recipe for Gingerbread, which is instrumental in the shaping of their destiny and fortunes. In a novel entitled Gingerbread, there is almost an inevitability that fairytales are involved, such as the well known Hansel and Gretel tale. Additionally, there are talking dolls, a feel of the gothic, the utilising of folklore, the deployment of magical realism, a raft of literary references, and ostensible talk of Gingerbread that allude to our current contemporary issues. Harriet Lee lives in London with her teen daughter, a Perdita curious about Harriet's past and her childhood friend, Gretel Kercheval, from her fictional homeland, Druhastrana, located in Eastern Europe. This inspires Perdita's quest to find Gretel.

I cannot say that I understood all the meanings and purpose in the novel that Oyeyemi may have intended, but I did find it in part a strangely joyous and surprising reading experience, whilst simultaneously oddly unsettling and elusive. I am left reflecting on precisely what it is I have read, and I can see myself doing this for some time. Many readers are likely to find this a frustrating novel if they are looking for plot and the traditional structures of storytelling. I did wonder about what star rating to give it, but in the end settled on 4 stars, primarily because I know I will think about it for some time to come. Many thanks to Pan Macmillan for an ARC.

Rounding up to three stars.

I've enjoyed Oyeyemi's other books,and have been looking forward to this one... but I have to be honest,over half the time I didn't have a clue what was happening.
There were times I got swept up for a bit,and that's why I made it to the end of the book... but I felt I was missing the bigger picture altogether.

This started off so well and I was looking forward to getting stuck into this book. But then it seemed to lose direction and I lost interest. Shame, because the writing is excellent.

I got lost in this book. Usually that’s a positive, but I actually mean that I struggled to make head or tail of it.

There is no doubt that Helen Oyeyemi is a talented wordsmith and I enjoyed her prose very much. However, I couldn’t keep the threads of the story untangled and found the characters rather weak and wispy which meant I didn’t participate care to find out what happened. This book took me far longer to plough through than it should and finishing it felt like a chore rather than a treat.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for my copy of this book.

I wanted to like it and maybe I am missing a trick but I found it rambling and incoherent. I couldn’t make sense of the plot and struggled to keep reading. Not for me I’m afraid.

Idiosyncratic is the word that springs to this reviewer's mind to describe this novel. A plot where gingerbread links 3 generations is certainly unusual but, to be frank, I couldn't get my head round it. Coherent and entertaining writing meant I read every page but, personally, that's all I can commend..

Ok. Let me be honest here. Maybe I am just not clever enough for this kind of weird magical realism because I have to say, there was a whole lot I just didn't get and then a lot more which I got but couldn't see the point of. It all starts out relatively straightforward in modern day London with Harriet and her daughter Perdita and I actually really enjoyed this initial tone of the novel. There are definitely quirky elements to it, but they don't overwhelm you. You can follow what is going on and I rather fell in love with Oyeyemi's writing style; some of her sentences are so vivid and unusual that they actively strike out at you. There are some moments that really resonated and were powerfully striking. If the entire novel had continued in this vein, it would likely still have been confusing at times and it still certainly would have required concentration to read, but it would have been less abstract and scattered.

It all started to fall apart about when Harriet begins to tell her tale to the bed-bound Perdita and you are suddenly removed from this London setting and taken to Druhástrana, a land that is less non-existent than has been previously suggested. From here is all just gets a bit too weird and it jumps around far, far too much. There's an absolute ton of information thrown at you and it is difficult to wade through it in order to work out what is actually important, let alone what is going on. Most challenging of all however, I found the characters introduced from this point onward were so much thinner and less fleshed out. Even the characters of Margot and Harriet who you already know seem somehow two dimensional. It's a pity this makes up quite a large proportion of the novel as a whole as I just didn't find it anywhere near as interesting and disjointed to boot. It doesn't help that there really doesn't seem to be much point to this retelling of Harriet's background, it doesn't move the plot on overly and just seems a rather strange addition to what was - up until that point at least - quite a strong novel.

I admit, I found the writing evocative and there are some wry and/or powerful truths on a variety of themes and issues. Oyeyemi has a strong and distinctive narrative voice, particularly in the earlier novel; she can draw you in to a time and a place, allowing you to live beside these two strange individuals. There are clear analogues to the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel and this is used throughout the novel but in unexpected and distinctly twisted ways that don't always make sense. There is a lot here to enjoy from the distinctive stylistic choices, the family dynamics and the social commentaries. But from the point where you are landed heavily on the moors of Druhástrana, the novel loses focus and certainly loses pacing as it just starts meandering round in circles. I'm intrigued enough by her writing that I may well try another of Oyeyemi's novels, but I'll certainly be treading warily.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for my free ARC copy of this novel.

I was so so so gripped from the beginning. I loved Perdita. However, from 50% in i got lost. With the plot and the story. Wasnt so much of a plot, rather than a stream of consciousness. I gave up half way through because i couldnt get what was happening.

Gingerbread is a modern, mythical novel about three generations of a family, an apparently non-existent place, and gingerbread. Harriet Lee lives in London with her daughter Perdita, where Harriet makes gingerbread she gives to fellow parents and other people in her life. When Perdita ends up trying to find her mother's long lost friend Gretel Kercheval, Harriet's life story starts to come out, including her youth in Druhástrana, a place of disputed existence, and her connections to the Kercheval family.

This is a distinctive and original novel that combines imagery of children's fairy tales, complicated family relationships, and a range of conflicts and fantastical happenings. The narrative moves from the present day back into Harriet's life story and then back to the present, unfolding a tale that is strange and ever-morphing, from looking for escape from working on a farm to the shady dealings of a company helping the inherited rich stay rich. Oyeyemi treats the eccentric cast of characters as just having a range of quirks and the fantastical elements of the novel become mundane.

Gingerbread is not a book that's easy to categorise nor is it always easy to work out what's going on and whether there's another level to what's going on. It is imaginative and stylish, and shows that literary fiction can be complex, disorientating, and take inspiration from children's stories and fairy tales.

This is an absolutely fascinating story that I really enjoyed reading. There are echoes of Eastern European folk stories and fairy tales, but based in a multi-cultural London. The story is based around Perdita, a teenager who wants to find out about her family history, including the identity of her father and the story of her mother's immigration from the mysterious Druhástrana. It is firmly based in the modern day, with lots of references to current technology, but with many allusions to literature and history. It became a little confusing at times, but this felt like a reflection of Perdita's state of mind, and there are some satisfying conclusions to mysteries. If you enjoyed any other Oyeyemi books, or similar folk-tale/magic realism works, for example Neil Gaiman, this is definitely worth a read.

I've been reading Helen Oyeyemi's work for years and I'm always surprised that she's not more well known. I always enjoy her brand of magical realist/surrealist tales that seem to pull from the depths of folklore and fairy story without ever being saccharine and which feature magnificent women, strong, bold and brave. I really, really enjoyed this book. I'm not entirely sure I understood it, but the language and the characters kept me gripped.

This is going to be wonderful for some readers. It's unclear, open to interpretation, whimsical, scattered, and for me ultimately unfulfilling and hard to follow. For others though, I can imagine it will instantly become a firm favourite.

What was that about? Very strange mix of fairy tale, drug induced nightmare and ramblings of a teenage girl. I tried - I really did - but goodness me, it made no sense.

A dazzling mix of folklore and pop culture, full of allusions, absurdism and wit.

Oyeyemi’s latest novel returns to her familiar themes of displacement, social-ineptitude and women who don’t quite fit in.

Harriet discovers her coeliac, teenage daughter, Perdita, unconscious in her bedroom surrounded by gingerbread - and her distraught dolls.

'Perdita has done her best to unmake herself, but they won’t let her. '

While keeping vigil, Harriet tells Perdita the story of her childhood and how she came to the UK with her mother, Margot, from Druhástrania. Reminiscent of Vulgaria (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), Druhástrania may or may not exist and is fictionally listed in Wikipedia as 'an alleged nation state of indeterminable geographic location.'

With Gingerbread, Oyeyemi riffs on Hansel & Gretel, and her novel shares many of the elements of traditional folktales: the normalization of magic, abstractness and flatness of character. Instead of psychological depth, we have dialogue presented in italics, adding to the not-quite-all-there sense of the characters who might fit a smile over their teeth 'like a gumshield.'

As ever with Oyeyemi's work, the novel rewards careful reading, without offering a solid plot to guide you through her world. Rather, it diverges and circumvents and follows blind alleys. However, if you are prepared to succumb to the marvellous, and willing to revel in the spellbinding prose, you are in for a feast.

'When there’s that kind of change in the way words work it can make you think you’re no longer in your right mind.'

Delicious and intoxicating, but plot-lite.

My thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for the ARC.

I couldn’t (and still can’t) decide if this book is bat-shit crazy nonsense or utter genius. I suspect it is probably both or at least lurking somewhere between the two extremes. It‘s that strange looking, undistinguishable lump on the plate that ends up being equal parts satisfying and suspicious.

At times I was baffled, at times I was captivated and at times I was just downright confused. A bizarre but also kind of compelling mixture of magical realism, social satire and what I can only describe as literary tomfoolery in a totally unexpected collision of the mundane and the surreal.

Did I enjoy it? I honestly can’t answer confidently one way or another. The only guarantee I can make about this book is that it’ll be totally unlike anything else you pick up this year. A literary experience if there ever was one and one that I expect will stay with me for a long time to come.

At the very least, it’ll look ever so beautiful on my shelf.