The Icarus girl - Helen Oyeyemi

 You can purchase books from Rovingheights with the link below 

https://rhbooks.com.ng/?ap_id=Jannaonyemaobi


Hello everyone, 

Thank you for stopping by. Today, I will be reviewing the Icarus girl by Helen Oyeyemi.

The protagonist (main character) is Jess, an eight year old girl. She is biracial; her mother is Nigerian and her father is English. Jess is always troubled, she screams when she is scared and likes to hide a lot.



Jess travels to Nigeria with her parents to meet her Nigerian relatives. She meets Titiola (tilly tilly as she would fondly call her), a mysterious young Nigerian girl and they become friends. 

Jess returns to England and continues to display odd behavior leading her parents to believing that she needs help. Tillytilly appears in England and then it becomes evident that she might not be real. Tillytilly becomes more and more involved in Jess’ life disrupting her normal behavior and trying to convince Jess that she needs her. This raises a lot of doubt in Jess’ mind and causes her to question herself.


Theme of the novel

1) Spiritual theme: The existence of doubles ( twins) and a spiritual friend.

2) Culture: The Nigerian and British culture and the challenges that comes with being biracial.

3) Magical realism and fantasy: A bit of the Nigerian mythology is incorporated in the book.

I loved that the author was able to capture the essence of being a young child trying to figure out how to form relationships and friendships with people including her parents.

The beginning was beautiful and it just kept pulling me in, I did not want to put the book down, but as I progressed, the story became a bit slow but still captivating.

I enjoyed the book and I loved the fact that it captured an eight year old point of view and how she sees the world. I was excited to see how it would end, I thought the end would answer some of my questions but instead it just left me with more questions.

I gave this book 4 out of 5 stars because of the slow pacing halfway through and also because of how it ended. It was an amazing read and I would recommend it.

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