I was judging the L.A. Times 2020 and 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’d been doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got me to read on even though it was among 296 other books I’m charged to read.

The silence had a thin skin.

I’m such a fan of Helen Oyeyemi’s work and imagination. The content of a contemporary tale with all the pleasures of a fairy tale.

What can I say? This book on a train turned out to be a complete train wreck. The story begins with newlyweds who have a mongoose for a pet...that can't be bad, right? Cute mongoose aside, I couldn't make sense of anything. The story revolves around some character who pretends to be multiple people, and yet, no one recognizes him. Yeah, I don't get that. I was left confused. This one's a no from me.

I normally review books for Boston's Arts Fuse site, but elected not to cover this one,

I do not award stars --

Deeply, intensely weird. Despite the relentless bombardment of strangeness I never found myself frustrated. In fact I often felt somewhat drunk on the rich, gorgeous, clever sentences. Glad to have read this.

Try as I might, I just couldn't get into the prose of this one. I've read and enjoyed Oyeyemi's work in the past, but I found the fantastical elements blending with literary too inaccessible in this one. Perhaps it was the POV character, perhaps it was a focus on details that didn't bring me into the world of the book. I'm not a fan of this one.

All of her books are odd and this was no exception! That said, I still enjoyed it very much. Her writing is beautiful, it's just the story that is usually out there!

I love Oyeyemi! At first this one felt a little underbaked compared to Ginger Bread or Mr. Fox, but there's a reversal near the end that proved to me she knew exactly what she was doing. At one point a character receives a thick packet of (what we must presume to be) admonitory notices from a government department that monitors novels that are Just Too Much--it's that kind of book.

Lovely writing yet a nonsensical plot, and just didn’t work for me. I loved the beautiful detail and descriptions, the anthropomorphized mongooses, the mysterious journey on the whimsical train, but lost interest in the convoluted story.... which is such a shame, as I’ve enjoyed her books in the past. Not for me I’m afraid.

Helen Oyeyemi is one of my favorite authors of all time. So imagine my dismay when, honestly, I really wasn't feeling this new one. The plot felt even more convoluted than usual. Usually I can suss out what she's going for, but this felt way over my head.
I will continue to love Oyeyemi and handsell the heck out of White is for Witching and Mr. Fox, but Peaces was just not for me.

Helen Oyeyemi keeps getting better and better. I was blown away by Gingerbread, so I was beyond excited to hear about Peaces. Yet again, she hits the nail on the head for perfect blend of head-scratching, lush, whimsy. There is a precedent set in literature and film for stories that take place almost entirely on a train, and while there are some that are classics, it can be difficult to maintain momentum for the entirely of a story when it is so contained. That is not something that Peaces has to worry about. The combination of flashbacks, letters, and twisting mystery in the present makes for the perfect, quick read. I also adored every single character. Their quirks, their backstories, how they reacted to situations and each other: I was utterly charmed, completely. Perfect for anyone who picked up TJ Klune's The House in the Cerulean Sea and loved it. I cannot wait to see what Helen Oyeyemi does next!

This gem of a book is incredibly odd. I don’t want to say too much about the plot because it’s better if you go into it blind. I will say it’s one of the best books I’ve read all year.

I’ve never used the word “bonkers” to describe a book, but the latest from Oyeyemi is bonkers. Otto, a hypnotist and his boyfriend take a “non-honeymoon honeymoon”. Xavier’s aunt has arranged a train trip for them. Its not just the two of them going. They take their pet mongoose. Mystery abounds as a stranger passenger threatens the inheritance of the train’s owner. There are laughs and suspense as Oyeyemi weaves together the story of the people on the train. It’s not my favorite novel from this author, but its inventive and fun with some insights I didn’t expect.

This is a very weird book! I enjoyed the confusion they gradually built to a kind of cohesion only to have the rug firmly pulled out from beneath me near the end. If you want to go on a journey that is nonlinear, but compelling, this is the book for you. A great choice for a book club.

I really enjoyed many of Oyeyemi's earliest novels (with the notable exception of her extraordinarily transphobic 'Boy, Snow, Bird'), but she's drifted into an absurdist style that isn't really my cup of tea. This novel, in many ways, continues this thematic evolution aggressively, since even 'Gingerbread' had anchoring familial/familiar relationships and slivers of realism that complemented the fantastical and more opaque/esoteric elements. This novel, however, didn't really balance that--it's almost all esoterica, absurdism, and splashes of twee elements that didn't really connect with me (though I did enjoy the mongoose's brief backstory).

This book was extremely absurd - both the premise and the book itself. It's one of those books that it's hard to figure out if I actually enjoyed it or not...I'm not sure I enjoyed the reading experience or the book itself, but I do feel like it was worth reading, simply because it was something different than I was used to.

A honeymooning couple takes a strange train ride with their pet mongoose and an eccentric would-be heiress and her entourage.

Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with this advanced copy. While I think the concept is great, I could not get into it. I could not connect with the way it was written and found myself having to re-read sections multiple times and still being confused. I think for the right reader, this would be great.

I could not finish this book. I couldn't get into the way it was written, it was too surreal for my tastes. I thought the premise was great though!

It would appear that Helen Oyeyemi has left me way behind. While I loved her early books, her most recent books, including this one, are just increasingly inaccessible to me. I keep hoping the next will be the one that pulls me back into her work, but I think I just need to move on.

This book just really made me think of an absurdist work, like something by Thomas Pynchon. There is so little to really grasp onto to keep the reader curious about the plot, and going from chapter to chapter feels continuously like one long non sequitur, with one "scene" having nothing to do with the next, meeting one random and strange "Alice in Wonderland" type character and then getting a kind of vignette of their backstory, then being propelled to some other section as if that never happened. I would have appreciated more coherent story line, and less artistic acrobatics, which is how this book ultimately felt, to me. Maybe I'm just not smart enough for the writing, but I just have no clue what I read.

This is definitely a book where you need to sit back and just let it take you where it wants to take you. It's both whimsical and unnerving, and goes in a lot of unexpected directions at a pace that seems almost aimless (until the last act). This meandering quality, this feeling that nothing is really happening (particularly in the beginning of the book) is made enjoyable purely by Oyeyemi's skill on the sentence level. There are just so many delightful descriptions and observations here - along with some lines that genuinely made me laugh out loud. As for the plot itself I really liked how a lot of it came together in the end, but I will say that the ending left the overarching message a bit muddled for me. A little more time spent dissecting the implications of the climactic scene would've been helpful. But aside from that? What a stunner, what a journey of a read.