Summarizing Oyeyemi is like trying to tell a dream, but I'll try. Oyeyemi's tendency to nest stories together, her willingness to let anecdotes and digressions swell until they take over the story, hearkens back to older story structures in which the hierarchies of narrative are less important than their ongoingness - think "One Thousand and One Nights" or "The Decameron." The anatomy of a typical Oyeyemi story is one of deliberate imbalance she inevitably opens more parentheses than she closes. Casual and accessible at the sentence level, they are not so much experimental as deeply comfortable with the pre-narrative and proto-narrative impulses at the heart of storytelling. Thank goodness, because the nine stories in this collection feel idiosyncratic in a way that is hard to imagine surviving a workshop setting.
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