Contemporary, energetic and kooky, this is a read centred around gingerbread. It is the route to everything, in a fairy-tale esque tale of oddity.

Harriet is a gifted teacher raising her daughter, Perdita, alone. She comes from Druhastrana, a fictional country, in the borders of the Czech Republic. I think it tells of Harriet’s youth through storytelling to her daughter. With a hint of the magical as well as the bizarre, I found it bubbling and rambling in its delivery.
I can reflect the skill in the writing, the way the prose weaves and is interwoven in a modern and mystical world, but I didn’t quite get it. The dialogues were tedious. Rather than entertain me, it bemused me. Instead of enjoyment it felt a bit of a chore as the story and its construction, no matter how clever didn’t hold me. It felt like it tried to be clever and blend in too many things; folklore, politics, drama, the trials of being a teenager, Shakespeare and literature. I think you need to savour each line and read it slowly to appreciate the writing, for otherwise it is a book with no plot. But the dialogue is pacey which makes this hard. Might work for some, but sadly not for me. Likely a marmite read.

This is a beautiful, melodic story of Perdita Lee and her mother Harriet, their relationship and experiences with the backdrop of the gingerbread. I particularly liked the story of how her great,great,great grandparents met at the scene of a hanging While the story does not have a pacy plot it is nonetheless an engrossing journey. I enjoyed the writing although at times craved a little more excitement

Helen Oyemi is at it again with Gingerbread, an inventive novel baked with all the inventiveness of her previous novels.

Inspired by gingerbread and how it appears in children's literature, this is an absurdly original and oftentimes meandering story of family and legacy.

It won't be for everyone, but it's well worth taking a bite out of.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin for providing me with an ARC.

Gingerbread is a skillfully written, meandering tale covering the lives of an unusual mother and daughter with a dash of fairy tale thrown in. I have to admit to struggling with this one, not because it is a bad book simply because the writing style is not the sort I enjoy. I’m sure that there are people out there who will adore it, but I am not the target “audience” for this type of novel.

Thank you to NetGalley and to the publishers for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

I am really not sure what to make of this book. I am not sure I understood the story at all. Nonsensical but brilliantly written in the sense that it is fantastical and whimsical. The mix between fairy tale and modern references was curious and perceptive, however I am really not sure what I've just read.

I can recognise that this is a technically good book - it is incredibly well written, it is unique on so many levels, and it no doubt will thrill a lot of people. I am a bit disappointed that it wasn't to my taste. It was a little bit too odd for me, which I know is a lacklustre way of saying why I didn't like it. I would never put people off reading it and say that it wasn't good (because it sort of is?) but it just wasn't for me. Amazing depiction of a classic story though.

Great book, very interesting concept and interesting characters.

Sometimes hard to follow the plot as so much is going on along with the magical realism.

Other than that, a great read.

I just found this too slow, it was likeable enough as a story but the pace just made me lose interest and it just felt like time dragged, with bit of editing I’m sure could be a lot better.


Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

I tried so hard to like this book. Whilst I didn’t hate it, I just found it a little slow I’m places. Perhaps just not my style of writing, the story was still enjoyable

A playful and sinister fairytale with all the usual ingredients of mothers and daughters, trials, separation, love and heartbreak, this is really a book to get lost in as you wander through the rich strands of interlocking stories.

Everything seems to have a secret loaded meaning whether you can interpret it or not, and the stories within stories are as enchanting as they are confusing.

More than a traditional fairy story, dark and modern in its approach but timeless in its ability to disorientate and distort perspective. A beautifully written book, abandon all logic and explore its own realities to really enjoy its depths as its meanings ring true.

Margot is the mother, Harriet is the daughter; Harriet is the mother, Perdita is the daughter.
They live in England now, though Margot and Harriet were born in Druhástrana.

Their sponsors are the Kercheval's, though there is more to them than that.
Gingerbread is something that Margot and Harriet make, to a family recipe, and SHARE with everyone. The secret ingredient is what makes it SO tasty.

The story starts in Druhástrana with Margot and then Harriet. Gingerbread is heavily featured, particularly in the first part of the story. In fact it is key to the whole.

Then in England we meet Perdita and find out her story, which includes trickery and deceit. The intrigue woven between the characters leads on to further plot developments which weave more gingerbread into the ending.

It's a long journey through the story, with lots of conversation and inner story telling. Sometimes the characters speak in Druhástranian (though it is written in English for the reader) and therefore the text is italicised in places. I admit to getting confused along the way. Who was related to whom and also who was speaking to whom. I got the general gist though.

I liked the overall theme of the book. I think if I could have followed it better I would have liked it more. I anticipate a follow-on, so would like to read that to see what happens.

I would have given 3.5, but that is not an option, so 3 it is.

I tried so hard to enjoy this book. I was so looking forward to starting it but I just couldn't get on with it at all.
It was a very slow read, yet despite this, I did not feel as though I came to low any of the characters beyond the basics.

I expected everything to come together toward the end but I was disappointed and felt as though I still didn't really know what was going on .

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

I really wanted to enjoy this book more than I did. I usually love magic realism - Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie have written some of my favourite books - but I just couldn't get on board with Oyeyemi's writing style. The story felt way too slow and yet I still didn't feel like you got enough detail about any of the characters to fully engage. It was a unique narrative and I'll try more of Oyeyemi's novels, but I don't think I'll be coming back to this one.

I really did not get on with this book. Magical and fairy-tale-like it sometimes seemed (following the gingerbread theme), every time I started to think I was beginning to understand the characters or grasp what was going on, I just clearly wasn’t.

Three generations of females make up the main characters – Margot, her daughter Harriet, and Harriet’s daughter Perdita. They face trials, hardships, and struggle to eke out an existence. To an extent they are saved by the Kercheval family, who take them on as some kind of pet project to nurture. All around everything is the gingerbread which seems to have its own industry, and is also some kind of drug. Things and people are not always real, and it’s hard to work out what is and what isn’t.

I did struggle on to the end (which was odd), but didn’t feel particularly rewarded to have got there.

Not for me.

This is a strange book, good in parts and with some nice description but it lacks coherence so it leaves the reader feeling unsatisfied. You end up with the sense of having read a book and not really being able to see the point of why you did it!

The book is a sort of fairy story or at least it picks up on elements from all sorts of fairy stories to create a kind of fabulous setting which also allows the writer to take liberties with reality. Harriet is the central character and sometimes she's rooted in reality and sometimes not. She has a daughter, Perdita, and a mother called Margot and the family are expert at making gingerbread which somehow has the effect of transporting people to a mythical never-never land called Druhastrana. Quite how this happens is never really explained but it means the book has two realities. Then, the bulk of the story is Harriet's account of growing up in Druhastrana which seem to me to be a kind of feudal Oklahoma! She tells her story to her daughter and to her daughter's strange talking dolls. There's a lot about gingerbread!

The fairly daft storyline is then exploited for the odd aside, knowingly suggesting that the writer knows how the real world is represented in fairyland so we get family dynasties, mentions of economic systems and misogyny without the book ever becoming an obvious satire or even a dystopia. There is a sort of humour in the telling so that a gingerbread house has recently had a nutritional label slapped on it.

I didn't warm to the characters or find them interesting but there is some nice description along the way. In the end you have the sense of a writer going through the motions in almost a slightly formulaic way without there being much substance or conviction in the writing.

Sorry this book is not for me. I couldn’t get in to it at all.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

This is a fascinating, challenging and rewarding book, one I wish I'd been reading in a book group because there are several possible interpretations of it.
On the face of it, the novel could be taken for a modern fairy tale, but it is both less and more than that. Yes, there is a fair bit of magic realism, Hansel & Gretel and gingerbread feature in it, and there's an optimistic ending (I think!) but anyone looking for a straightforward fairy story might be disappointed.
For me, "Gingerbread" reflects many aspects of life in multi-cultural Britain. For starters, it considers the nature of "otherness" and the impact of differences and hierarchies within the overarching group of "others"; there is a powerful feminist element; and the significance of ties of family and of friendship feature. There is more than a nod to abuse and an almost unbearably realistic love affair. Most of all, for me it is about how we all see our world and how individuals can and do react to apparently whimsical, erratic and inexplicable changes (physical as well as political, social and economic) in our environment.
With many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for giving me a copy in exchange for this review of a novel I shall have to revisit.

I like unusual narrative styles, and I’m usually a fan of a meandering sentence, but I just couldn’t get to grips with this at all. I really struggled to follow the story, feeling like it was maybe referencing folklore I wasn’t familiar with or that was perhaps just entirely made up.

This is a book that I have been looking forward to reading for a long time. It is a fairy tale about magic and family and is beautifully written. But there was something about this book that I just didn't 'get', and I am literally scratching my head trying to think what to write about it to explain how I feel about it. I usually love books that are on the odd, unusual or downright weird side but this one..... Having said that the writing is wonderful and very original. I'm not going to let it beat me and I will read this book again at some point to try to understand it a bit more.

What to say about this strange, disturbing, book? There are moments of real beauty in the writing, and some of the characterisation and story telling is magnificent, but for me the book just didn’t hang together as a whole. Oyeyemi writes in very long sentences which often become wandering if not impenetrable at times. The story is difficult to follow, with frequent dissolution into many strands, and the strands don’t always come together in any comprehensible way. Try as I did, I decided not to finish it, as I read for pleasure and was just not enjoying the book.