White Is for Witching

This is a brilliant take on the haunted house tale.

The writing slips from one point of view to another smoothly but unsettlingly, revealing slivers of the secrets that the Silver family are keeping from each other, sometimes even taking on the persona of the house itself.

And the way whiteness is used—as a symbol, as a concept, as an identity—is unique and truly frightening. It’s something that the characters devour until it devours them.

White Is for Witching is, on the surface, a story about a gothic haunted house, but it opens with a reference to “Snow White”—“Her throat is blocked with a slice of apple / (to stop her speaking words that may betray her)”—and conjures that tale throughout the novel. Collapsing witching, whiteness, and outright racism, White is for Witching suggests that the same racial superiority undergirds “Snow White,” where the eponymous character is celebrated for her whiteness, implicitly naturalized as beauty when she is identified as “fairest in the land.” White is for Witching, like Oyeyemi’s other fairy-tale novels, rewrites… show more.

A scary, clever novel about witchy women that takes in big themes: mental and physical illness, grief, racism, nationalism. Oh, and a haunted house with its own voice. The themes are tragic, but the telling is often funny. It’s the story of Miranda, a young white woman who suffers from the eating disorder “pica”, her friend Ore, a black Cambridge student who both loves and fears Miranda, and Miranda’s family and community: the Silvers, father, brother, and Miranda’s dead mother; the Eastern European kids at school; the Yoruba cook; Miranda’s terrifyingly magical ancestors. Like me, you might have to read… show more.