What is the author's style in the short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours?

The language of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours frequently recalls that of a fairytale while still adding modern touches. The opening to “books and roses” is perhaps the most obvious reference to fairytale language: “Once upon a time in Catalonia a baby was found in a chapel” (1). “drownings” uses a similarly expansive, sweeping kind of fairytale language, but then undermines that same decisiveness. “This happened and it didn’t happen” (153), it begins. In fact, all of “drownings” is marked by a similar kind of fairytale language: “The tyrant had started off as an ordinary king, no better or worse than any other, until it had occurred to him to test the extent of his power… How much time could his subjects bear to spend queuing for butter? … That was the sort of thing that made life for his subjects harder than life was for citizens of neighboring companies” (159). The vagueness of the language—never naming the tyrant or the country, calling the people subjects, choosing a perennial object like “butter”—invite the reader into this alternate universe, vaguely familiar and yet unable to come into sharp focus. Another use of fairytale language, which orders the world into heroes and villains, appears in “a brief history of the homely wench society.” Day watching “the perfectly proportioned Hercules Demetriou” (233) is startled to see that “the young hero was still looking over” (232). By calling Hercules Demetriou a young hero rather than just a first-year law student, Oyeyemi gives her story an added fairytale dimension—a courtship not just between two young university students, but between a dashing hero and an unlikely heroine.