White is for Witching has been dividing the opinion of readers for a while. I am always intrigued by books that create a love-hate divide and so set out to find out which side of the fence I’d fall.
White is for Witching is supposed to be a creepy book. Unfortunately I was too confused to feel any ghostly chills, but there were a lot of strange happenings in this short novel.
The book centres on a pair of twins, Eliot and Miranda, who move into their ancestral home – a crumbling house on the cliffs of Dover. The twins are mourning the death of their mother, but the house does more to scare than comfort them.
The book is narrated by four different characters, one of which is the house. This was a great idea, but I found the narrative to be disjointed and confusing. I felt that the experimental writing style was given priority over plot.
There were frequent sections of beautiful writing, but the lack of any real plot meant that I frequently lost interest in the book and had to force myself to pick it up again.
The sun was setting into storm clouds; there was a smoky brightness outside, as if the world was being inspected by candlelight. I saw the woman who’d brushed me on the stairs the first time I’d gone up them. This time when I saw her I knew she wasn’t a house guest. She was standing under one of the trees, standing so deep in the ground that the earth levelled around her ankles. As if she had no feet, as if she was growing.
I think this is one of those books that would benefit from re-reading, but although some things would probably become clearer there would still be a lot of questions left unanswered. Some people think this ambiguity is spooky, but I just found it frustrating – when I finish a book I like to have some idea of what happened!
If you’re the sort of person who loves reading modern fairy tales and gets excited by the appearance of unexplained apples then you could be one of the people who love this book. Unfortunately I prefer books with a more conventional narrative.
The thoughts of other bloggers:
I could seriously go on and on about all the things I loved in the book A Striped Armchair
…as confused as I may have been, I was also in awe of Oyeyemi’s fresh voice…
I really didn’t have a clue as to what was going on for the majority of the book. Serendipity
…a little too much structural experiment for my liking… Stuck in a Book
Did you enjoy White is for Witching?