Mutable logic flows through every aspect of Gingerbread-plot, character, and space-revealing the flexibility of structures and worldviews that we normally see as rigid and immovable. Oyeyemi’s novel is a fairy tale not because it is moralizing, reductive, gooey, or pretty-to-think-so-it is a fairy tale because it captures the systems of the world, rather than the systems of the individual, and because it does this using the slippery and associative logic of the human mind. Not the Disney ones, of course, but not the rewrites, helpfully reminding us that “the originals are a lot darker,” either. This is because the tradition in which Helen Oyeyemi writes is not the modern literary novel-it is the fairy tale. It’s not a book that makes sense as a modern novel stylistically, character-wise, or narrative-wise.
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