Icarus Girl [Hardcover]

Eight-year-old Jessamy Harrison, the daughter of a Nigerian mother and a British father, sometimes spends five or more hours hiding motionless in the family's linen closet, attempting to find some sort of "fragile peace." Prone to uncontrollable screaming fits, both at home and at school, she also has high fevers and panic attacks, and often talks to herself. Struggling with obvious emotional problems, Jess is a bright but lonely child, with no friends, a mother who spends most of her time writing, and a father who is away most of the day.

When her mother takes her to Nigeria during a school vacation, she sets in motion a series of events which ultimately leave Jess struggling to hold on to her selfhood. While visiting her Yoruban grandfather, Jess explores an abandoned building and discovers a strange girl her own age secretly living there. Titiola, whom Jess calls TillyTilly, becomes her first true friend, and though Jess explores the countryside with her, no one in her family ever sees her.

When Jess returns to school in England, her friend TillyTilly follows. Jess is delighted at first, but TillyTilly begins to monopolize her time, deliberately breaking things in the house, "getting" people who make Jess unhappy, and causing accidents. Jess's parents become alarmed at the havoc, especially when Jess insists that it is caused by her mysterious, unseen friend. Then TillyTilly reveals a family secret, and the battle begins in earnest for possession of Jess's soul.

Nigerian author Helen Oyeymi, who wrote this book when she was eighteen, incorporates aspects of Nigerian culture when Jess returns to Nigeria on a second visit. Oyeymi keeps the action fast-paced and creates considerable suspense as Jess, through TillyTilly, becomes physically dangerous to those around her. Only her Yoruban grandfather, who believes in magic and traditional ceremonies, seems to have the resources necessary to exorcize the demon.

The novel moves along smartly, developing tension and excitement by recreating many of the nightmares of childhood, though the author's simple approach to complex problems may reflect her youth. Jess, an eight-year-old, is far too sophisticated about TillyTilly and too articulate about her fears to inspire much reader empathy, and she never feels quite realistic, especially when she herself questions whether TillyTilly really exists. Both her ultimate battle with TillyTilly and the conclusion of the novel feel artificial. Still, Oyeyemi has created a psychological horror novel which dares to be different, incorporating a clash of cultures and parallels with the Icarus legend in this memorable debut novel. (3.5 stars) n Mary Whipple

According to the book jacket, author Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria, lived in London since the age of four, and completed THE ICARUS GIRL before age nineteen. Given her wealth of life experience, she naturally wrote about what she knew: an eight-year-old girl of mixed English/Nigerian heritage, daughter of a biracial couple, whose life changes irremediably subsequent to her first visit to her African homeland. Drawing upon mythical elements of Nigerian spiritualism and the Yoruba language, Ms. Oyeyemi has written an African inspired version of Tom Tryon's 1971 book, THE OTHER, a psychological thriller with elements of gothic horror.

While Ms. Oyeyemi offers a hopeful new literary voice, her first book is a mixed bag. Her descriptions of the main character, eight-year-old Jessamy, and Jess's confusions about growing up, dealing with her parents, and coping with her uncontrollable compulsions and the sheer surreality of her spirit companion TillyTilly are believable. However, most of her supporting cast is remarkably flat, most egregiously Jess's Nigerian mother Sarah Harrison and her white, English father Daniel. Well intentioned in their introduction of Jess to her mother's African family, Sarah and Daniel revert in England to being among the most singularly distant, disinterested, and obtuse parents ever written into fictional life. Following their return from Nigeria to England, Jessamy nosedives into various states of hysteria and violence that evoke little more from her mother than ever more concerted efforts at her own children's writing; she gets even less response from her father. Jess's teachers, her classmates, and her psychologist, Dr. McKenzie, are nearly as flat, as are most of her African family. The only partial exceptions are the underused grandfather Gbenga Oyegbebi, and Dr. McKenzie's daughter, Siobahn (nicknamed Shivs, as in home-fashioned prison blades, or perhaps short for shivers?).

THE ICARUS GIRL mixes shocking revelations about Jess's birth with nightmarish accounts of her interactions with the seemingly omniscient TillyTilly (whose true nature readers will quickly guess), eerie foretellings, and unlikely coincidences. Characters feel waves of cold in TillyTilly's presence (THE SIXTH SENSE with Bruce Willis, anyone?), icy touches and self-closing doors. The overall effect is part Stephen King horror story, part exploration of the pre-adolescent psyche in a culturally mixed but not particularly nurturing family setting, and part Carlos Castenada flights into ethereal spirit realms.

Ms. Oyeyemi puts forth an intriguing and psychologically-conflicted voice in Jessamy. At her best, the author delivers her story in captivating prose images that effectively portray her young protagonist's loneliness, confusion, feelings of separateness and abnormality, and even her ambivalence toward TillyTilly as both prospective friend and possible threat. In the end, however, THE ICARUS GIRL resolves itself through an easily anticipated, quasi-religious transformation that asserts unconvincingly the superiority of African naturalism (hence the repeated invocation of Jessamy's African name, Wuraola, meaning gold) over the Western rationalism of psychology. Intriguing to a point, the book ultimately delivers something less than it promises. Nonetheless, an interesting read for anyone seeking a fresh literary voice.

Eight-year old Jessamy Harrison has never been like the other girls at her school in Bromley, England. Daughter of a Nigerian mother and a British father, Jessamy is gifted, difficult, even peculiar, given to screaming tantrums and strange, febrile fevers. Jess spends hours alone, reading and drawing, seemingly content in her own company. Early in the novel, the family visits Nigeria, where a bevy of aunts, uncles and cousins await and, most significantly, her maternal grandfather, who believes in the ancestral ways but is a devout Christian. It is on this visit that the solitary Jessamy meets a new friend in an abandoned building, Titiola, whom she calls TillyTilly. Jess is delighted to have a playmate, drawn into the intimacies of young girls sharing secrets. Titiola's true identity is unclear until the family returns home, where she appears once more.

TillyTilly knows all of Jess's secrets, the girls at school who ridicule her difference and lack of social skills, anyone who disturbs or makes Jess angry. But eventually Jessamy realizes that no one can see her new friend; she is invisible. It is at this point that the novel shifts from fiction to fable. Is this girl a figment of Jessamy's imagination, a panacea for her emotional turmoil, or is there a darker source, in the roots of African folklore, where spirits have the power to enter the physical realm? As the disturbing incidents increase and Jess realizes she can't control TillyTilly's appearance or her actions, fear presides, those closest to Jessamy affected by the sinister presence of this sister-friend who does or doesn't really exist. The tale beings to make sense when Jessamy's parents take her to a therapist. It is through the girl's response to Doctor McKenzie that the real image of this tormented child takes shape.

It is TillyTilly who tells the shocking secret of Jessamy's birth: she was born a twin, but her sister did not survive. TillyTilly yearns to take the lost sister's place, but all is twisted around her own identity as the missing half of another twin. TillyTilly wields her power, controlling Jess, whose fright grows in proportion to escalating events. As a twin, Jessamy is a child of three worlds: "this one, the spirit world and the Bush, which is a sort of wilderness of the mind", according to Jessamy's mother. In a desperate struggle for dominance, Jess returns to Nigeria with her family, there to confront her confusion. It is here that the battle for Jessamy's soul is engaged, a fight waged between two realities, the physical and the spiritual, the living and the dead.

The novel was written by Oyeyemi before her nineteenth birthday, capturing both the innocence and the deviousness of an unhappy child who cannot find a comfortable place to inhabit, a place where conflicting emotions are allowed to coexist; instead, folklore mixes with reality, the half-life of the spirits begging recognition. The Icarus Girl is imbued with the language of otherness, a fairy tale in which anything is possible, ancestral rituals in Nigeria, lost twins and imaginary friends part of the warp and weft of the fragile fabric of Jessamy's existence. Luan Gaines/2005.

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