The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi5/17/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() There, she meets Titiola, or TillyTilly, her first real friend, a little girl with supernatural powers who follows Jess back to England and proceeds to wreak havoc on all who wrong her. Precocious and troubled, Jess feels out of place both in England, where her parents make their home, and in Nigeria, which she visits at the novel’s start. The Icarus Girl tells the story of eight-year-old Jessamy Harrison, the mixed-race daughter of a white English father and Black Nigerian mother. Oyeyemi’s melding of these three disparate subgenres and their expectations creates a distinctly postcolonial and humanized uncanny child. Less recognized is The Icarus Girl’s contribution to two of horror’s big turn-of-the-millennium booms – creepy kid movies, which were having quite a moment with offerings like The Ring (2002), The Sixth Sense (1999), and The Others (2001), and children’s gothic literature, whose prominent titles include The Series of Unfortunate Events (1999-2007) and Coraline (2002). Indeed, The Icarus Girl remains Oyeyemi’s most overtly Nigerian novel. ![]() Most scholarly attention locates it among Nigerian diasporic literature, which experienced a boom in American and English publishing at the start of the twenty-first century. The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi’s 2005 debut novel, lives at the intersection of three contemporaneous trends. ![]()
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