"Gingerbread" by Helen Oyeyemi

An audio book, read by the author. There are 3 generations of women - Perdita (teenage schoolgirl), Harriet (her mother, on the school's parents association), and Margot. Margot's alias on Perdita's phone is "Nightlife Tsar". Harriet's is "Minister of Health, Education and Welfare". The family's gingerbeard recipe has included bad rye in the past. This time it's hospitalised Perdita. Gluten allergy, but a serious attack - suicide attempt? While she's unconscious, things happen.

The language is lively, the dialogue believable, and there are many side-plots which may become dead-ends or significant threads. There's a country, Druhástrana, that may or may not exist. Harriet was brought up there (her friend Gretel lives there), Perdita goes there in a dream (or her supposed death), and it has a Wikipedia entry.

Oyeyemi has throwaway ideas that other authors would build a story around. She can riff off anything. "a Jack-in-the-box with a pegged on smile and eyes that popped out on springs and bounced every which way. Its wind-up handle's broken but that doesn't stop him jumping out and squawking Ha Ha Ha just as you were trying to tiptoe past, carrying breakable goods. Maybe he was solar powered". The action moves to Druhástrana, back when Harriet was 14 and became a Gingerbread Girl, moving to the big city, working for a company. The book sags here for quite a while, becoming rather YA. Harriet's boy friend Gabriel goes to Oxford University. Does he love her as much as she loves him?

Harriet got pregnant by Gabriel at 17. There was pressure on her to have an abortion. Perdita has met Gabriel's family (they live in Whitby), though she knew them as Hansel and Gretel (actually Ambrose and Tama, her grandparents?), and a private detective (actually Reme, a friend of Gabriel). She wants Gretel and her mother to meet up again. They offer her a powder that will transport her to Druhástrana.

Harriet talks to Gabriel on Skype. He says he didn't like gingerbread until she made him eat it. She goes back to the gingerbread factory. Jonathon Baker haunts it. Is he real? Why introduce him now? Why introduce Sago and Bonnie? The 2nd house they visit is in Western Bohemia. The 3rd (perhaps haunted) house is a gingerbread house that drifts out to sea. Only special rings will unlock its door. At the end the action returns back to the parents association. Salomea appears, her place more a lab than a toyshop. Gretel's a changling. Harriet wonders if Perdita is really Gretel.

Wisdom spouts from many mouths -

• half of the hatred that springs up between people is rooted in the belief that there is any human relationship more sacred than friendship
• a good meal to have when the darkness of the night begins to seem as if it's aspiring towards the eternal
• of course being is an unnecessary thing, a kind of mistake I didn't think I'd find forgiveness for.

Too much rambling and free-wheeling for my liking.

Other reviews

• Erica Wagner (the reader is curious not only about Perdita’s birth but about her more profound origins, too: her family history, her mother’s story, and her mother’s lost friendship with a woman named – you guessed it – Gretel. It’s an intriguing premise, stitched together with fine and surprising imagery, and yet the novel as a whole never quite hangs together. [] There is no boundary, in Oyeyemi’s work, between the magical and the real: and no such boundary exists in the human imagination. When blending the two there is always the risk of whimsy, and Gingerbread falls on the whimsical side of the scale.)
• Katharine Coldiron (the book’s influences are a glorious jumble. Oyeyemi has written a novel that calls to fairy tales both ancient and contemporary, and its characters have an odd fixation on 19th century French literature (Zola, Balzac) – yet there’s a whole subplot about the ridiculous parents’ association at Perdita’s school, a mini-Where’d You Go, Bernadette in the middle of this entirely different novel, and the situation with Margot’s family recalls Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. The language of the novel ranges similarly, from slightly baroque to nearly minimalist. However, it never fails to compel)
• Anita Felicelli (If we read procedurals to enjoy a sense of order restored, everything put it in its place, we read Oyeyemi for the opposite reason, yet she is no less suspenseful. Later, we learn she wasn’t exactly in a coma; she took a trip to Druhástrana, where Harriet grew up. Druhástrana here appears to be a reference to death, and perhaps also to dreaming, to loss of consciousness, to what’s not here. When Perdita eats the gingerbread, she seems to have killed herself. She loses consciousness. And yet, when she awakens, she’s been somewhere, the specific place her mother is from. She was searching for Harriet’s childhood friend Gretel Kercheval on the other side. In Gingerbread, the loosening of reality and referents from language may be at its most extreme yet. It’s a novel that’s difficult to follow both at a sentence level and narratively, but its challenging stories come to an incredibly satisfying conclusion.)