From the Bookshelf of Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge…

The Icarus Girl

Helen Oyeyemi

Start date: April 22, 2015

Why we're reading this: The story about the author was as intriguing as the debut novel she wrote. I was also interested in choos…more
[close] The story about the author was as intriguing as the debut novel she wrote. I was also interested in choosing a story set in a different country and one completely unlike my usual preferences

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Mar 24, 2015 Mary rated it liked it

Shelves: format-audio, read-harder-2015

Read Harder - written by someone when they were under the age of 25 (Helen Oyeyemi was under the age of 20!)

Scary and magical (I tell myself it's just words but I still have nightmares) and beautifully written. It started out so calmly - a lonely 8 year old gets an imaginary friend - but quickly grows to horror. The Nigerian culture and mythology are painted so vividly, in stark contrast to the plain (white?) of suburban England. I'm not sure I "get" the ending, but oh well. I enjoyed it (even w ...more

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Jul 27, 2016 Jessica rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle

What a weird book! I really loved it up until the end, where the weirdness ballooned to a point where I wasn't sure what was actually happening in the novel anymore. So I'm only giving it three stars, but the rest of the novel really deserves more than that - it's just so unsatisfying at the end.

I hadn't read any Helen Oyeyemi before, and I wouldn't have picked this as my starting point except that I've been trying to steer my 2016 reading choices around meeting all the goals on the 2015 and 20 What a weird book! I really loved it up until the end, where the weirdness ballooned to a point where I wasn't sure what was actually happening in the novel anymore. So I'm only giving it three stars, but the rest of the novel really deserves more than that - it's just so unsatisfying at the end.

I hadn't read any Helen Oyeyemi before, and I wouldn't have picked this as my starting point except that I've been trying to steer my 2016 reading choices around meeting all the goals on the 2015 and 2016 Book Riot Read Harder challenges (since I didn't know about the challenge in 2015), and one of the 2015 challenges was to read a book written by an author under the age of 25. Oyeyemi wrote The Icarus Girl, her first novel, at 18 and was published by age 20, so I picked this book based entirely on her age and without knowing a thing about the book itself.

I didn't expect this to be so creepy, but this novel I picked without knowing anything about the story starts out just feeling a bit weird and surprises you partway through by being pretty much a horror story. It's about a lonely eight-year-old girl who is prone to hiding in small spaces and to throwing massive tantrums. She lives in England, where her white father grew up, but early in the book she and her parents take a trip to Nigeria, where her black mother grew up, so that she can meet her mother's family. She takes an instant liking to her grandfather but is disappointed to realize none of her cousins are her age, so she feels just as lonely in Nigeria as she did in England - until she meets Titiola. Jessamy can't speak Yoruba and knows she's saying her new friend's name wrong, so she calls her TillyTilly instead. The two girls become fast friends, but Jess gets a creeping suspicion that something is odd or off about TillyTilly - but she's so grateful to have a companion that she doesn't let herself think about this very much.

Things only get really weird when Jess's family goes back to England, and TillyTilly turns up there too. Jess is so grateful to have a friend that she doesn't question this at first, but TillyTilly gets more singleminded and obsessive in her friendship with Jess, and she starts hurting people she thinks are being mean to Jess. It also becomes impossible to keep pretending that TillyTilly is a normal human girl, and Jess is left struggling with whether she's going crazy (is TillyTilly some kind of horrible imaginary friend?) or whether she's being haunted by a ghost or evil spirit. TillyTilly's behavior gets more and more dangerous, and nothing Jess does can make her go away.

The story is fascinating, and I really wish Oyeyemi had found a better way to tie it all together at the end - but then again, this is a first novel, written when she was a teen! I am really looking forward to reading some of the things she wrote after this, as The Icarus Girl shows a huge amount of promise and had me engrossed and on the edge of my seat all the way up until that bizarre final section. ...more

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