RavePublic BooksIn this thrilling and unsettling novel, Oyeyemi offers an elegant, sometimes humorous, and always acute marriage of fairy tale and contemporary politics of race, nation, and belonging. Like Oyeyemi’s earlier fiction, Gingerbread is both beautiful and useful, because elements of fairy tales—the unspecified temporal and geographic dislocation of \'once upon a time\'—gift to the reader the distance necessary to perceive the fantastic and absurd functions of race and nation ... Gingerbread calls attention to the functions of race and racism by delaying or withholding declarations of characters’ racial identities. In this Morrisonian vein, Oyeyemi treats Blackness as a racial identity that need not be marked, because here it has the primacy of the norm (a position reserved for whiteness in most writing in English). Oyeyemi reveals Blackness by delay, comparison, and negation ... Oyeyemi proffers a fairy tale as an irresistible invitation for the reader to, like Perdita, taste the gingerbread in all its complexity and make a fantastic journey with stakes for living in a world where race and racism remain defining features of our political and social reality.
