Even the final pages hint at yet another beginning as strange as those that came before. Oyeyemi avoids clean endings and lessons, opting to launch her central characters in a new direction instead.

Where Oyeyemi’s previous novels that riff on fairy tales can be linked to a genre archetype, Gingerbread reads more like multiple fairy tales wrapped up in one. Instead of delivering a harrowing tale of struggle and danger, Harriet’s saga becomes a bizarre story laced with haunting moments that mirror contemporary concerns. Gingerbread’s more fantastical elements don’t quite obscure Harriet’s grim history, but rather package it in a way that avoids emotional highs and lows. the unifying element among the rapid changes of setting, characters and narrative direction is gingerbread and its power to transform Harriet’s life. Oyeyemi’s latest novel, Gingerbread, proves that her writing still remains an unpredictable delight, whisking readers through a fantastical tale with contemporary relevance. And then, like all fairy tales, she promises it was just a dream - leaving behind the mist, an aftertaste, a gnat in the throat. Page by page, Oyeyemi brings such territory nearer for Perdita, and for us. She also understands that to generations in new lands the old ones are so far away as to be theoretical. Gingerbread is a novel that recognizes the way relationships can grow out hardship and being stuck in places one wishes to leave. Oyeyemi can’t help, though, but inscribe intimacy into a tale in ways that defy the difficulty she creates.

Gingerbread works hard to do this, sometimes too hard: It has four asides and winks to the reader when one would do, and it’s stuffed with literate references, which clog the enchantment machine on which a tale - any tale - ought to rely. In a world in which we feel based on what we see, novels that address migration need to scramble preconceived emotions to produce something more complicated than drive-by empathy. As Gingerbread proceeds, its fairy-tale texture cools, and the book hardens into the kind of story its elaborate misdirection is meant to cloak: a tale of economic migration.

Gingerbread helen oyeyemi summary