Oyeyemi’s prose is propelled by a subtle animism; her sentences sometimes seem to contain the whole book in miniature ... Likely to scramble the senses. Genres and registers collide: her prose offers, in a single page, poetic candor, sly wit, dad jokes, and contemporary therapyspeak ... Some novels insist on being read as prescriptions for living; Oyeyemi’s simply depicts a process: one splinter of a soul briefly gains control of a body, and goes out to be engulfed by the world.
It’s a brilliantly fun set-up ... But whether the book works overall is a different matter. Most jarringly, the seven Kingas don’t feel distinct enough to make the supposed rivalry between them believable. Perhaps it’s just over-ambition on Oyeyemi’s part; for while a character per day seems a simple premise, when it comes to it, the Kingas end up seeming very similar. But maybe this is the point after all.
Oyeyemi continues to sound and write like nobody else ... No clue or stray reference, however wacky, can be safely ignored ... Most of the pieces come together eventually, and the headlong ride, involving a kidnap plot, nefarious activities in a strip club, perfume criticism worthy of the great Luca Turin and the untangling of identities and interconnections, is never less than enjoyable ... Above all, Helen Oyeyemi’s prose feels freshly squeezed, zesty and stimulating, while her reader awaits a plot line to emerge like a Magic Eye puzzle. She is a skilful writer in a way that seems ever more rare, lexically precise, grammatically exact.
What’s the book about? As ever with Oyeyemi, it’s hard to say, and perhaps entirely beside the point ... The denouement, when it finally comes, is so gloriously absurd, you can’t help but salute Oyeyemi’s knack for artful nonsense. She is a gleefully unapologetic trickster.
Readers familiar with Oyeyemi’s work know to expect a surrealist adventure with stories within stories, matryoshka-doll-style, and fans of her complex tales will find much to enjoy in this dazzling novel that cleverly explores the many different selves that make up one woman navigating modern life.
Oyeyemi offers us an existential farce that wrestles with what it means to reconcile all the pieces of yourself, especially when they're in constant disagreement about how best to live a life. There are more questions than answers in this dreamlike novel of dissociation—but that's also part of its thrill.
