Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi, reviewed.

To read a Helen Oyeyemi novel is to willingly enter a tangled wood, where the paths wander and circle, and the way out isn’t always clear, but the scenery is full of an alarming and brilliant beauty. One fan has told Harriet that eating the stuff is like eating revenge: “It’s like noshing on the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they’d got away with it.” Harriet herself describes the perfect gingerbread as “a square meal and a good night’s sleep and a long, blood‐spattered howl at the moon rolled into one.” Gingerbread has dominated the lives of the Lee women. Gingerbread includes citations from the entry, in a deliciously Borgesian flourish: “I Belong to Druhástrana, Republic of Beauty,” by Guadeloupe Moreno, translated by Drahomíra Maszkeradi “I Belong to Druhástrana, Republic of Freedom,” by Anele Ndaba “I Belong to Druhástrana, Republic of Justice,” by Tansy Adams “I Belong to Druhástrana, a Republic That Is Judging You All,” by Nimrod Tóth, translated by Drahomíra Maszkeradi “Nimrod Tóth Does Indeed Belong to Druhástrana, a Republic of Breathtaking Hypocrisy,” by Simeon Vesik, translated by Drahomíra Maszkeradi To Harriet, who grew up in one of Druhástrana’s hard-scrabble farming communities, the place is all too real. They only knew how to continue.” Not that they would want to change anything even if they knew how: “Ask any Druhástranian man or woman and he or she will admit this truth … the truth that he or she can find the strength to live out a lifetime under the most dire privations as long as there’s a chance, however irrational, that he or she could someday stumble upon some abundance that’s accompanied by the right to keep it all for himself.” This might suggest a universal peasant-class mulishness, but Druhástrana is so cut off from the rest of the world because its populace, in a fit of anti-immigrant pique, passed an edict called the Great Referendum, which severed both formal and informal international relations. This involves whisking away all of the village’s female children, installing them in picturesque dormitories, dressing them up in petticoats and bonnets, and setting them to bake gingerbread and provide tours of what Harriet calls “an authenticity theme park.” Harriet only discovers the nefarious truth behind this scheme through the help of the landowner’s daughter, Gretel Kercheval, who first appears by climbing out of a well.