CVK
I highly recommend this book to everyone–I’m about two-thirds of my way through it right now. Helen Oyeyemi finished her novel The Icarus Girl when she was only 18. The novel is about Jess, a girl who–like Oyeyemi herself–has a Nigerian mother and English father. Much of the plot surrounds her imaginary friend TillyTilly, who grows increasingly threatening and unstable, and may or may not be the ghost of her dead twin sister. Metro Toronto interviews Oyeyemi about the book:

Oyeyemi acknowledges the similarity of themes among a handful of current, young, female, mixed-race British authors. Like Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Diana Evans’ 26a, she writes of mixed-race couples and their kids. Also like Evans, she uses a twins theme.

“For me, twinship was a device, a way to talk about identity politics, and there being two and trying to integrate into one, and how it’s not possible. Or necessary.

“I actually realized, with writing this book, that there’s no need to be one or the other,” Oyeyemi says of having two very different cultures. “I’m actually talking about it a lot with some of my colleagues at school, about this third place,” says Oyeyemi.

“There’s this whole idea of being able to reach into a grab bag of cultures, of mythologies and rituals,” she says.

“It’s liberty.”