Icarus Girl
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A sensation among readers around the world, The Icarus Girl is the beautifully written story of eight-year-old Jessamy "Jess" Harrison. Sensitive, whimsical, possessed of a powerful imagination, Jess spends hours writing, reading, or simply hiding in the dark warmth of the airing cupboard. As the child of an English father and a Nigerian mother, Jess just can't shake off the feeling of being alone wherever she goes, and other kids are wary of her terrified fits of screaming. When her parents take her to Nigeria to visit her mother's family, she encounters Titiola, or TillyTilly, a ragged little girl her own age. To Jess, it seems that, at last, she has found someone who will understand her. But gradually TillyTilly's visits become more disturbing, making Jess start to realize that she doesn't know who TillyTilly is at all. A story of twins and ghosts, of a little girl growing up between cultures and colors, this book heralds the arrival of a remarkable new talent.
About this Author
HELEN OYEYEMI is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, along with six novels, including Gingerbread and Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Reviews
"Oyeyemi brilliantly conjures up the raw emotions and playground banter of childhood. . . . A masterly first novel." --The New York Times Book Review
"Oyeyemi writes about childhood as if she were not inventing but truly remembering it, not through the distancing lens of time, but as scary and magical as it really was." --San Francisco Chronicle
"Remarkable. . . . As original as it is unsettling, The Icarus Girl runs straight at the heart of what it means to belong." --O, The Oprah Magazine
"[The Icarus Girl] provides evidence of a vivid imagination capable of moving freely between cultures and continents. . . . Haunting and suspense-filled." --The Washington Post Book World
"The Icarus Girl's real tragic inevitability lies in the fracture of childhood into the shock of maturity itself; a bleakness in the light, bright state of childhood is the real subject of this curiously wild, curiously blithely-voiced novel. . . . Its simple-seeming rewrite of the simplest of imaginative impulses goes further than an analysis of cultural and personal displacement to suggest that no childhood is ever normal, that the strains between parents and children will inevitably break you whichever you happen to be." --The Guardian
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