![]() ![]() Perdita Lee, an eccentric, isolated British schoolgirl, lives with her single mother, Harriet, an adult education teacher, and her hardy grandmother, Margot. ![]() Despite its fantastic trappings, the novel is deeply concerned with the instability of family and with the ways in which family can be defined, revoked, and discovered. Oyeyemi’s women struggle to preserve their families, which tend to grow and diminish with informal adoptions, abandonments, and betrayals. Gingerbread is essentially a family saga in the form of two interconnected mother-daughter stories, in which the women repeatedly flee from constraining institutions, whether in the form of a farmstead, a factory, or a benefactor’s family mansion. ![]() Oyeyemi has always been fascinated with folklore, and the novel subtly works elements of the fairy tale into modern British life. In her seventh book, Gingerbread, the British novelist Helen Oyeyemi delivers a characteristically beguiling origin story that follows the fortunes of three generations in the Lee family. ![]()
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