Wind Beneath Wax Wings

Nigerian by birth, British by upbringing, Oyeyemi draws on her twin cultural identities to delineate her protagonist, the precocious eight-year-old Jessamy Harrison. The only, lonely child of a white English father and a Nigerian mother, she writes haiku, reads The Lord of the Rings, professes familiarity with Shakespeare and Coleridge, hides in cupboards to avoid playtime and screams herself sick for reasons unknown.

A holiday in Nigeria, decides her mum, is just what she needs to be taken out of herself. And so it seems initially, as Jess finds TillyTilly, a girl just a bit older than herself. She becomes the soulmate Jess has never had: a friend to giggle with, a conspirator to share her secrets, someone to hold hands with on a wild romp 8212; and someone who can whisk her into a locked room or an amusement park shut for the day.

Wishful thinking? A creature of an overactive imagination? A mirror image? A ghost? A dead twin? Halfway through the 300-page book, Jessamy wakes up to a fact the reader had apprehended several chapters ago: TillyTilly is not quite of this world.

With that realisation, the novel goes into a freefall. As with the friendship band Jess weaves painstakingly for Tilly, Oyeyemi tries to pull together too many strands 8212; African myth, parent-child tensions, schoolyard bullying, mysterious illnesses8212;until she has the reader wishing he could, like Jess, unravel the braid and do it all over again with more congenial colours.

Because colours there are aplenty, all yearning to be explored and broken down into shades and hues. Jess8217;s relationship with her Nigerian grandfather, her love-hate rapport with her mother, her budding trust in the psychologist, Dr McKenzie, are all possibilities left tantalisingly unconsummated.

Instead, Oyeyemi succumbs to the threat of magic realism that shadows the book from the early chapters, making for pages and pages of Jess8217;s chilling imaginary? realtime? tussles with a malevolent TillyTilly, triggering uncharitable images of parents insensitive to their own child8217;s agony. Resolution comes, somewhat predictably, with a car accident and a little help from an ibeji statue.

Icarus, then, is an apt mascot for this debut novel. Like the mythical boy, Oyeyemi soars over the troubled landscapes 8212; a child8217;s disturbed mind, in this case 8212; and, like him, grows perhaps too ambitious for her burgeoning powers.

That said, The Icarus Girl holds enough promise for the author8217;s next to be eagerly awaited. More thrillingly, Oyeyemi is assurance that the Zadie Smiths and Monica Alis were not flashes in Britain8217;s multicultural pan, but simply the harbingers of a wonderfully rich literary future.