Riverhead Books
Mr. Fox
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Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction
One of Granta's Best Young British Novelists
From the prizewinning young writer of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Gingerbread, and Peaces comes a brilliant and inventive story of love, lies, and inspiration.
Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding, and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, the celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently.
Mary challenges Mr. Fox to join her in stories of their own devising; and in different times and places, the two of them seek each other, find each other, thwart each other, and try to stay together, even when the roles they inhabit seem to forbid it. Their adventures twist the fairy tale into nine variations, exploding and teasing conventions of genre and romance, and each iteration explores the fears that come with accepting a lifelong bond. Meanwhile, Daphne becomes convinced that her husband is having an affair, and finds her way into Mary and Mr. Fox's game. And so Mr. Fox is offered a choice: Will it be a life with the girl of his dreams, or a life with an all-too-real woman who delights him more than he cares to admit?
The extraordinarily gifted Helen Oyeyemi has written a love story like no other. Mr. Fox is a magical book, endlessly inventive, as witty and charming as it is profound in its truths about how we learn to be with one another.
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Book Details
ISBN:
9781594486180
EAN:
9781594486180
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
336
Authors:
Helen Oyeyemi
Publisher:
Riverhead Books
Published Date: 2012-06-11
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The very best thing about Mr. Fox was that I was able to engage my 13 year old granddaughter in a really intelligent and thoughtful conversation. YES! I was talking at the dinner table about books my book club was selecting for next year's reads, and Rosie asked me what I was reading. So I sketched out the rather convoluted third of the book that I had read so far. At a subsequent dinner she excitedly read to me from a book of fairy tales her literature teacher had reserved for her class that had a synopsis of Mr. Fox-a variation on the Bluebeard tale. She was so excited - and so was I! I also love the writer's latest-the Parasol and the Axe> lovely stuff!
Very good condition and package thanks
I struggle sometimes to rate books, because some books just want to entertain, and if they succeed at that I might give them 4 stars. But some books try things infinitely more difficult and don’t succeed. So do I rate them down because they didn’t accomplish something hard?This book is the equivalent of an Olympic gymnast attempting the most difficult vault and failing. I admire the attempt, even if it didn’t work.There is a lot that is interesting here. I loathed St. John, but that’s kind of the point. I think the structure of the narrative is interesting and it’s definitely well written. I just am not sure what I’m supposed to take away from the story.
The book was hard to follow at times. There’s a lot of - time travel?? You have to for sure keep up.
It's very hard for me to rate this book. I vacillated between 2 and 3 stars, settled on 2.5 and rounded up. If this were a collection of short stories, I think I would have liked it much more. The writing is very good and the short stories mostly interesting.Because the author chose to frame the stories with the odd love triangle of St John Fox, his wife Daphne, and his imaginary muse Mary Foxe, I found myself constantly distracted, trying to understand how the stories fit into the over-arching plot (such as it was). I understand these were different takes on the story of Bluebeard, but it didn't work for me.
