Peaces

It's hard not to feel like a passenger aboard this book . . . there are few writers who can match Oyeyemi's creative glee.

Oyeyemi is a master of leaps of thought and inference, of shifty velocity . . . Here, secrets are revealed, skirmishes ensue, and at the book’s end the story lands more Patricia Highsmith than Agatha Christie: a maze of identity and desire that has an ending, but not a solution.

The queen of magic realism . . . funny, inventive and alluring.

Oyeyemi’s abilities as a writer have outlived the hype that once overshadowed them . . . It’s the unpredictability of this journey that lends the story its emotional life force.

Playful and puzzling . . . bewildering and bewitching.

Intoxicatingly romantic . . . Peaces is elliptical and strange and funny, and despite its Wes Anderson–like setting, it’s a very bleak little cautionary tale. It proposes that failing to grasp someone’s essential self is pernicious and contagious, that we mistake outlines and portraits for bodies and souls.