'What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours,' by Helen Oyeyemi martin’s day goose,” her retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Hungry wolves, stopped clocks, puckish demons, mournful ghosts - all are right at home here. As a rebuke to realist fiction, Oyeyemi taps a vein of European folk tales, as in “dornicka and the st. This playfulness pervades the brilliant “presence,” which is about married psychologists and a scientific experiment gone wrong (or maybe right). … He just shrugs and says: ‘Take your pick. Perhaps we read him along the lines of our attractions. For Radha and Gustav Rowan is both male and female. “Is your blood as red as this?” unfolds in a sinister puppet school where pupils and marionettes mingle, their identities fluid: “Rowan is male to me,” one puppet says of another. (It also helps that several characters appear throughout the book, a kind of novel in stories in which their fates are gradually revealed - or not.) The opening piece, “books and roses”(story titles are all lowercase), portrays clandestine love inside a vast library and secret garden. What binds the collection together is Oyeyemi’s use of keys, literal and metaphorical, that unlock (or not) the mysteries of what it means to be human. Who and the Brothers Grimm, YouTube videos and “The Lord of the Rings” and yet stand apart, a stylist like no other. It’s a credit to her protean talent that she can evoke, at least for one reader, A.S. Her first collection of linked stories, “What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours,” audaciously samples genres from fantasy to pop culture to science fiction to academic satire, creating a disquieting world that exists as a shadow version of our own. Over the course of five novels, Nigerian-British writer Helen Oyeyemi has emerged as one of the most unnervingly original writers at work anywhere, thwarting expectations with a fierce glee.

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi