What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

✍ Scribed by Helen Oyeyemi

• Publisher: Penguin Group USA
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 181 KB
• Edition: 2
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0698407873

✦ Synopsis

"Transcendent." — The New York Times Book Review

" Flawless. . . another masterpiece from an author who seems incapable of writing anything that's less than brilliant. " — NPR

From the award-winning author of Boy, Snow, Bird and 2019's Gingerbread comes an enchanting collection of intertwined stories.**

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Playful, ambitious, and exquisitely imagined, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is cleverly built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical. The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret—Oyeyemi’s keys not only unlock elements of her characters’ lives, they promise further labyrinths on the other side. In “Books and Roses” one special key opens a library, a garden, and clues to at least two lovers’ fates. In “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” an unlikely key opens the heart of a student at a puppeteering school. “‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea” involves a “house of locks,” where doors can be closed only with a key—with surprising, unobservable developments. And in “If a Book Is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think,” a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason).

Oyeyemi’s tales span multiple times and landscapes as they tease boundaries between coexisting realities. Is a key a gate, a gift, or an invitation? What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours captivates as it explores the many possible answers. **

From School Library Journal

Keys are central to the short stories in this collection; they can either open or lock away something of significance for the characters. All of the tales are intertwined with themes of search and possible retrieval, which will draw young adult readers into worlds that are sometimes secretive and sometimes elusive; they will be able to easily identify with that search of self that so often comes with adolescence. The characters are relatable to YA readers, from the young woman looking for her long-lost mother and heritage to the hopeful music fan wanting to find the best in a broken artist. These worlds and characters are complex and passionate, and readers will find themselves longing for more once the stories end. Even though the settings are quite strange (a locked library, a city of stopped clocks, a marshland of the drowned), there's a complexity here and the brilliant prose gently pulls readers in, encouraging them to identify with the characters. VERDICT A must-add to libraries, this work will appeal to fans of literary fiction.—April Sanders, Spring Hill College, Mobile, AL

Review

Praise for What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours :

“Magical and show stopping.” — Elle.com

“Stunning. . . Highly imaginative and enchanting. . . This collection is Oyeyemi at her best.” — Buzzfeed, Included in **"Most Exciting Books Coming in 2016"
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“Enchanting.” —BookRiot
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“These nine casually interlocking stories. . . overflow with the cerebral humor and fantastical plots that readers have come to expect from Oyeyemi.”_ —Kirkus (starred)_

Praise for Boy, Snow, Bird :

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“Gloriously unsettling . . . The greatest joy of reading Oyeyemi will always be style: jagged and capricious at moments, lush and rippled at others, always singular, like the voice-over of a fever dream.” — The New York Times Book Review

“Superbly inventive . . . examines the thorniness of race and the poisonous ways in which vanity and envy can permeate and distort perception.” — O, The Oprah Magazine

“By transforming ‘Snow White’ into a tale that hinges on race and cultural ideas about beauty . . . Oyeyemi finds a new, raw power in the classic. In her hands, the story is about secrets and lies, mothers and daughters, lost sisters and the impossibility of seeing oneself or being seen in a brutally racist world. . . . [Oyeyemi] elegantly and inventively turns a classic fairy tale inside out.” — Los Angeles Times

“The outline of Oyeyemi’s remarkable career glimmers with pixie dust. . . . The atmosphere of fantasy lingers over these pages like some intoxicating incense.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Praise for Mr. Fox :

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“Oyeyemi has an eye for the gently perverse, the odd detail that turns the ordinary marvelously, frighteningly strange.” — The Boston Globe

“Startling, beautiful . . . [ Mr. Fox ] should not be ignored.” — Chicago Sun-Times

✦ Subjects

Electronic books