When The Icarus Girl, her debut novel, was released, Helen Oyeyemi had just turned twenty and, having written her book in secret when she should have been studying for her A-levels, was hailed as a literary prodigy. The Icarus Girl, a novel about a girl growing up between cultures and colours, was a commercial as well as critical success and left readers anxious to see whether Oyeyemi could maintain such a level of invention and entrancing use of language in her future works. White is for Witching is Oyeyemi’s third novel and her most thematically complex work to date. Expanding on the gothic themes first considered by Oyeyemi in The Icarus Girl and in her second book The Opposite House, White is for Witching is an ambitious novel concerning witchcraft, malevolent spirits which can lurk in the most unexpected of places and the depths of insanity which can infest a young woman and plague her family.

As a child, Miranda Silver developed pica, a rare eating disorder that causes sufferers to consume inedible substances. Following the death of her mother when she is just sixteen, Miranda’s condition worsens and leaves her with an insatiable hunger for chalk. This is just one of the problems that Miranda must overcome as she settles into life in the family home with just herself, her twin brother Eliot and her devastated father Luc. Perched high on the cliffs near Dover, the house had been in the possession of her mother’s ancestors for generations and, to Miranda at least, it seems to display a capricious dislike for change as well as outsiders. Converted into a bed-and-breakfast by Miranda’s father, the house seems to manifest a conscious malice towards strangers and quickly dispatches visitors who it despises. Enraged by the near constant stream of guests and new staff, the house becomes fiercely possessive of Miranda and, finally, unleashes its most destructive power.

White is for Witching is narrated by three distinct voices, with Miranda’s story being told by her twin brother Eliot, by Ore, a Nigerian girl who befriended Mirada during her first term at Cambridge, and by an additional menacing persona that could be either the house itself or the spirits who dwell there. Following these three very different voices adds an interesting, even haunting, dimension to the story and allows Oyeyemi to explore various interpretations of the same set of admittedly mysterious facts. Oyeyemi is generally able to give each of the narrators their own subtle tone and linguistic pattern although she does occasionally slip, resulting in it being rather difficult in certain places to determine who is narrating.

While the central themes of White is for Witching are clearly the inheritance of witchcraft and the maternal hauntings that only Miranda can detect as she journeys away from the normalcy of her family and towards insanity and the paranormal, perhaps more interesting is the thread of romance that entangles Miranda and both Eliot and Ore. The human relationships that occur in White is for Witching are both compelling and fantastically tragic and it would have been perhaps more interesting if Oyeyemi had devoted more time to these ‘human’ issues rather than concentrating so heavily on the supernatural ground on which she has based her previous works. Despite this, Oyeyemi’s rendering of the house itself as well as the disappointed and tormented spirits who reside there is delightfully macabre and the chilling elements of White is for Witching generally work well. There are occasions were Oyeyemi’s love of ghosts outweighs her love of ghost stories and so suspenseful moments are disrupted or, as on one particular occasion, ruined but, generally speaking, the spookiness does manage to resonate throughout the novel.

White is for Witching is certainly not Oyeyemi’s greatest novel, that honour still belongs to The Icarus Girl, but it is still an ambitious story that works predominantly well. Although not as spine-chilling as it could potentially have been, White is for Witching does serve to investigate the impact of spirits on the living and the claustrophobic terror that certain building can induce.

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