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What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Helen Oyeyemi Books

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What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Helen Oyeyemi Books

I'm not entirely certain what I expected out of this book. I'm not even entirely certain how I *got hold* of this book, to be honest--I just ran across it one day while cleaning out my kindle. I suppose I must have bought it a few months back after reading a review somewhere, or maybe because the title appealed, though I don't remember doing that at all. Which is entirely apropos to the stories here: each one involve moments of intense strangeness, often reported with a comedic banality. Oyeyemi's stories exist in a kind of exquisite Lagrange point between fantasy and outright surrealism, balancing there delicately without seeming to put much effort into the act, focusing instead on their characters and their often-detached emotional experiences. The collection is loosely linked by keys (they show up a lot), characters (who often move on from one story to pop up in another), and in all cases, by the nature and power of storytelling.

The first trio of stories--about an orphan girl who is left a mysterious key and begins to collect the stories of others like her; about a step-father who becomes increasingly perturbed by his step-daughter's worship (or is it hatred?) of a pop singer accused of sexual misconduct; and about a girl who falls in love with another girl at a party, and this leads her unexpectedly to become a puppeteer whose puppet houses the spirit of a grand old puppet master--are probably my favorite. Lyrical and a little haunting, they weave a kind of spell around you as you read. The increasing weirdness of their worlds sneak up on you first in tiny eddies, then crash over you in great unexpected waves. Yet these stories are all so firmly grounded in their characters that it doesn't ever dislodge your attention, only draws you further under. And all of them end on perfectly unexpected notes, a little final surprise that leaves your scratching your head, maybe, or flipping back to earlier pages to reread a passage that might have meant something entirely different from what you thought it did.

As the collection goes on the thematic currents make themselves more obvious--interests in non-traditional relationships, feminism, the talismanic properties of books, why we keep secrets that are essentially meaningless to anyone who is not ourselves. And if it slows down a little, if the shine of Oyeyemi's language wears off a tad, if the stories hold you a little less toward the end than they did at the beginning... well, it's a price well worth paying.

I can't remember when I've enjoyed a book of short stories as much as I did this one. It makes me eager and wary of her novels in equal measure: how can they possible prove themselves equal to the magnificent grace of her shorter writing?


Tags : Amazon.com: What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (9781594634635): Helen Oyeyemi: Books,Helen Oyeyemi,What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours,Riverhead Books,1594634637,Short stories,Short stories, English - 21st century,Short stories.,ENGLISH CONTEMPORARY FICTION - INDIVIDUAL AUTHORS+,English Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors,Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology,Fiction Magical Realism,Fiction Short Stories (single author),Fiction-Short Stories (single author),GENERAL,General Adult,Great BritainBritish Isles,Magical Realism,Short Stories (single author),United States

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Helen Oyeyemi Books Reviews

Impossible to follow. Not bad for bed time reading, as most of the stories are short enough to finish in an hour. And most of them are different than most of what I've read. If I read another one of her books, it will have to be a complete story.
These stories are phenomenally beautiful. I don't know how to describe them - I'm not sure there's any way to encapsulate their strange, dark magic in any words besides the ones in the stories. Read this book as soon as you can.
Oyeyemi's stories are inventive and fascinating. Her characters are a diverse group by race, ethnicity, sexuality, and non-binary gender. If you have grown up in Western culture feeling as if there are no representations of you in media, please read this book. You may find yourself or someone you would like to be here. Some of the stories share characters, but they are spread out over time, distance and varying points of view that lend new dimensions to earlier tales. I was amazed and delighted by this book and highly recommend it.
3.5 Stars

Weird, sometimes wonderful, but… just as often crazy-weird, as in if she was sitting across from me telling me these stories, I would either suspect she had taken some magical mystery tour courtesy of Timothy Lear’s medicine cabinet, or she needed drugs of another kind.

“books and roses” – This was my favorite, and the reason I kept reading the remainder of the stories. What’s not to like about a story including a mysterious library and a locked garden?

“A library at night is full of sounds The unread books can’t stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.”

“sorry doesn’t sweeten her tea” – rock stars and their bad behaviors

“It’s a nice house for Ched too, in that it’s big and he got it on the cheap, and anyway he’s not really comfortable in overly normal situations. As it is he hears voices. Nobody else hears these voices but they’re not just in Ched’s head, you know? In this world there are voices without form; they sing and sing, as they have from the beginning and will continue until the end. Ched borrows their melodies That’s the music part of the songs he writes.

“is your blood as red as this?” – creative tale about puppets and puppetry.

"You told me about how stories come to our aid in times of need. You'd recently been on a flight from Prague, you told me, and the plane had gone through a terrifyingly long tunnel of turbulence up there in the clouds. 'Everyone on the plane was freaking out, except the girl beside me,' you said. 'She was just reading her book--maybe a little faster than usual, but otherwise untroubled. I said to her 'Have you noticed that we might be about to crash?' And she said 'Yes, I did notice that actually, which makes it even more important for me to know how this ends.”

“I was on my way out and they thought they were helping me; instead they turned motion and intelligible speech into a currency with which personhood is earned.”

“drownings” – a “warning” tale, not wonderful but okay.

“There’s that difficulty with delirium too You see it raging in another person’s eyes and then it flickers out. That’s the most dangerous moment, it’s impossible to see something that’s so swiftly and suddenly swallowed you whole.”

“presence” – bizarre … like an episode of Twilight Zone based on something like Dr. Phil’s couple’s counseling...

“Two minutes until midnight. She looked around at the pale blue walls, then out of the window and into the communal garden; there was a night breeze, and the flowers were wide-awake.”

“a brief history of the homely wench society” – This was okay, more relatable but to me didn’t feel as if it fit in with the others.

“dornicka and the st. martin’s day goose”- just okay

“freddy barrandov checks…in?” I enjoyed almost everything about this story.

“Yours is a pitiful existence. I had you followed for six months and all you did apart from turn up to play in a sandpit with infants was go to galleries, bars, the cinema, and a couple of friends’ houses. What kind of person are you? I spoke to your weed dealer and he said you don’t buy that much. You are without virtue and without serious vice. Do you really think you can go on like this?”

“ if a book is locked there’s probably a good reason why, don’t you think?” - My second favorite in this collection, with a weirdly wonderful ending.
My book club read this book as one of our selections. It took me a while to get through it and many members never passed the first story. It is well written but definitely not your typical book. If you're looking for an easy read, you may not enjoy this. I think it would be great for a literature class- to be analyzed and dissected. If you begin reading with the proper expectations I believe you will thoroughly enjoy this one. The author is very unique, creative and super talented. I appreciate her writing about many underrepresented groups.
I'm not entirely certain what I expected out of this book. I'm not even entirely certain how I *got hold* of this book, to be honest--I just ran across it one day while cleaning out my kindle. I suppose I must have bought it a few months back after reading a review somewhere, or maybe because the title appealed, though I don't remember doing that at all. Which is entirely apropos to the stories here each one involve moments of intense strangeness, often reported with a comedic banality. Oyeyemi's stories exist in a kind of exquisite Lagrange point between fantasy and outright surrealism, balancing there delicately without seeming to put much effort into the act, focusing instead on their characters and their often-detached emotional experiences. The collection is loosely linked by keys (they show up a lot), characters (who often move on from one story to pop up in another), and in all cases, by the nature and power of storytelling.

The first trio of stories--about an orphan girl who is left a mysterious key and begins to collect the stories of others like her; about a step-father who becomes increasingly perturbed by his step-daughter's worship (or is it hatred?) of a pop singer accused of sexual misconduct; and about a girl who falls in love with another girl at a party, and this leads her unexpectedly to become a puppeteer whose puppet houses the spirit of a grand old puppet master--are probably my favorite. Lyrical and a little haunting, they weave a kind of spell around you as you read. The increasing weirdness of their worlds sneak up on you first in tiny eddies, then crash over you in great unexpected waves. Yet these stories are all so firmly grounded in their characters that it doesn't ever dislodge your attention, only draws you further under. And all of them end on perfectly unexpected notes, a little final surprise that leaves your scratching your head, maybe, or flipping back to earlier pages to reread a passage that might have meant something entirely different from what you thought it did.

As the collection goes on the thematic currents make themselves more obvious--interests in non-traditional relationships, feminism, the talismanic properties of books, why we keep secrets that are essentially meaningless to anyone who is not ourselves. And if it slows down a little, if the shine of Oyeyemi's language wears off a tad, if the stories hold you a little less toward the end than they did at the beginning... well, it's a price well worth paying.

I can't remember when I've enjoyed a book of short stories as much as I did this one. It makes me eager and wary of her novels in equal measure how can they possible prove themselves equal to the magnificent grace of her shorter writing?