Me and my shadow: a remarkable first novel from a young Brit haunts the mind and soul.

Can a writer step out of herself and write a novel? Helen Oyeyemi, author of the novel The Icarus Girl, says she did just that.

"The best part of The Icarus Girl was leaving myself behind and imagining, taking a diasporic look at Nigerian myth and this strong, brave, whimsical, precocious little girl that I wanted to get to know," Oyeyemi says.

Writers often talk about holding conversations with their characters. Some authors even wonder where their stories come from. But if the story isn't from the author, well, where is it from? Is it possible for a writer to be haunted? Of course, many believe that even the Bible was distorted by the messenger.

Confusing isn't it? It all really depends on what you want to believe. But that's the beauty of it. The same can be said about Oyeyemi's remarkable debut novel, The Icarus Girl.

In the novel, eight-year-old Jessamy Harrison, born to a Yoruba (Nigerian) mother and a white, British father, is a sharp-minded girl who spends much of her time reading Shakespeare and writing haiku. However, when life gets too demanding she has a habit of throwing screaming tantrums and being antisocial.

Twin Spirits

In hopes of setting Jessamy straight, her parents take her to her mother's village in Nigeria. Jessamy's mother is a bit of a rebel; her lather sent her to England to become a doctor. Instead, she decided to study literature, become a writer and marry a white man. Nevertheless, Jessamy and her parents are welcomed with open arms.

In many ways, this trip is the introduction to the side of Jessamy that is Nigerian, and, as we find out, this comes with consequences. Jessamy's cultural struggle is subtle but powerfully drawn. For example, when her grandfather calls her by her Yoruba name, Wuraola, the name is so unfamiliar to her that she thinks, "who?" and isn't sure what to say or do.

It's inside the deserted Boys' Quarters of her grandfather's compound that Jessamy encounters TillyTilly, a strange Nigerian girl who is about Jessamy's age and height, and seems to know everything about Jessamy. Oh, and there's one more thing, Jessamy's the only one who can see her. When Jessamy returns to England, TillyTilly shows up at her doorstep, and this is when the trouble really starts.

In Nigeria, there are several myths about twins. The Yoruba people even have the highest rate of twins in the world. In traditional Yoruba culture, twins are celebrated and even believed to possess mystical powers. Oyeyemi draws from this myth in her novel.

To Be Whole

Racial, cultural, psychological and spiritual conflict and a vague ending, this is heavy stuff for an 18-year-old, the age at which Oyeyemi wrote her novel. Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria to Yoruba parents and raised in England. Though Oyeyemi admits to small parts of the novel being semiautobiographical, she says that there isn't enough of herself in the novel to call it semiautobiographical.

"I think the speculation about whether The Icarus Girl is semiautobiographical is almost flattering in that I must have convincingly reproduced a psychotic ailment in a character to the point that people think I've experienced it," says Oyeyemi, who is now a 20-year-old student at Cambridge University in England.

Being very well read, Oyeyemi is quick to reference theorists like Claude Levi-Strauss and David Emile Durkheim. Literary theorists, however, will be the first to claim that a text is more a product of a culture than of an individual; that the individual is more the medium through which culture speaks.

It's hard to dismiss her background as having any influence on The Icarus Girl. Only after the novel was written did Oyeyemi even realize a few things about herself.

"I was really surprised that the novel became a story about Jess's need to be whole because I had no idea it was a preoccupation of mine," she says.

However she procured it, Oyeyemi had excellent insight into the mind of this bright but troubled eight-year-old girl who sees more than what's there. Oyeyemi was deftly able to capture and balance the many types of conflicts Jessamy must battle. When writing the character of Jessamy, Oyeyemi was very conscious of what she was doing. In particular, she was aware of the fact that Jessamy, a biracial and mentally troubled girl, ran the risk of falling into the stereotype of the "tragic mulatto."

"Jess's backstory of being solitary and preferring books to dealing with people is sufficiently explanatory with regards to her illness--I flag up that it's solitude and unhappiness, not 'bad blood' that make it difficult for her to get out of her own head," she says.

A Living Thing

Even before Jessamy, the most intriguing character is the chameleon-like character of TillyTilly. "I think TillyTilly is an illness of the spirit; that's how I find her," Oyeyemi says.

In the book, however, TillyTilly is more riving than spirit. In an attempt to scare Jessamy's cousin and baby-sitter, right before their eyes, TillyTilly uses her powers to pull Jessamy literally down, through the floor into the ground. This incident is one of many where Oyeyemi uses mystery, Nigerian myth and imagery to convey Jessamy's sense of fantasy, dislocation, cultural confusion and psychological trauma.

Still, there are times when the novel's use of confusion and vagueness don't work as well. For example, one of Jessamy's teachers "goes away" possibly because of TillyTilly, but you never know for sure or if she ever returns. A friend of Jessamy's is hospitalized but does she ever recover? There are a few other plot turns that are left unexplained.

Lastly, the final showdown and the ending of the novel happen so fast and through such a fuzzy lens that they feel false, as if the story ran out of steam. If one has read a "sprit personality" novel before (be it literary or genre), it'll be easy to recognize the predictable ending.

Oyeyemi has shot into the literary world with a brightly burning novel, but she certainly won't have the destiny of the mythical Greek character Icarus. Her wings are held together with strong juju, not wax. You can expect to see more fiction from Oyeyemi spiced with African myth and folklore.

"Myth is an unbreakable mirror that helps second-generational sons and daughters of any culture, not just Nigerian, access the fears, joys, humor and identity of their original country in a way that food, music and family sometimes can't," Oyeyemi says. "They capture the mind, imagination and heart, and that's why I love folklore!"

The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi Nan A. Talese/Doubleday June 2005, $23.95 ISBN 0-385-51383-6

Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu's young adult fantasy novel Zahrah the Windseeker (Houghton Mifflin Company) was released in September 2005. Her second novel, Ejii the Shadow Speaker was recently acquired by Hyperion Books for Children.

RELATED ARTICLE: Homework can wait.

By Angela P. Dodson

Helen Oyeyemi's name has been on the lips of booksellers and critics on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean even before the release of her novel in the United States in late June. The Nigerian-born, British student, who was a mere 18 when she wrote it, has been discussed and written about in high places, including The New York Times and The Washington Post and National Public Radio.

The Times reviewer said it was "deserving of all its praise, this is a masterly first novel." The Post's Bookworld deemed the book "worth the attention." The London Sunday Telegraph called it "an astonishing achievement"; and The Christian Science Monitor pondered what early success will translate into continued literary success for the young woman.

Time will tell, but Oyeyemi is continuing her studies in social and political sciences at Cambridge and hopes to go on to do a masters in African studies when she graduates in June 2006, perhaps studying a while in the United States, she said in a cross-Atlantic e-mail exchange. She lives on campus during the school term and with her parents, a brother and a sister during holidays. Her father is a special education teacher, and her mother works for the London Underground, she said.

The Cambridge University student, who turned 21 in September, said she was discovered after she sent 20 pages off to an agent, Robin Wade, for feedback. He "got back to me the next day to let me know that he let his toast burn while he was reading it and that he thought he could sell the book to a publisher if I finished it. I wasn't expecting that at all, so big a shock."

She quickly found herself with a lucrative two-book deal and completed the first while studying for exams, keeping the writing a secret from her parents. "It would have been too complicated to explain to them why I was doing that instead of studying," she said. After the book's release in the U.S., she spent a week on tour here and returned to resume her writing and her studies.

"The second book is about Afro-Cuban mythology, which I got absorbed in when I found things about the Yoruba roots in many of the tales and legends," she said. "I'm still working on it. I want to keep writing for as long as I can, but not full-time, so I'll be looking for a job once I've finished studying." She has also written two plays, Juniper's Whitening and Victimese, which were being published by Methuen in a single volume in the U.S. in September.

"There hasn't been that much reaction amongst my circle about the book," she said. "Most of my friends are very bookish, and we spend more time arguing about other people's books. If there's been any fame, I haven't noticed it."