Time and space dissolve in her hybrid forms, and they dissolve for her as a writer as well. Liberated by the irreal, Oyeyemi moves at will anywhere she wants to go.

In her second novel, “The Opposite House,” one Santeria goddess character lives in a house with two doors: one that leads to London, the other to Lagos a perfectly made supernatural element that functions simultaneously as an agent of the book’s surrealism and a metaphor for the character’s prismatic self. Her work abounds in twins, doubles, haunted houses and the like but also in mixed-race characters, grief, exile and what might be described as the fickle magic of identity. Fox,” Oyeyemi has drawn on mythology, fairy tales, the gothic and all manner of supernatural narrative traditions to get at the place where individual psychology collides with culture. From her debut novel, “The Icarus Girl,” through 2012’s “Mr. That Oyeyemi, a British writer on the cusp of 30, is taking on a time and place so distant to her and that she so elegantly and inventively turns a classic fairy tale inside out will surprise no one familiar with her earlier work.

Eventually, the mother and her divided daughters - one so white, the other so black - must reckon with one another and the violence the mirror has caused. They do talk, but they lie, and they cheat, and they function more as screens of cultural projections than as neutrally reflective surfaces. In her hands, the story is about secrets and lies, mothers and daughters, lost sisters and the impossibility of seeing oneself or being seen in a brutally racist world. Moreover, by transforming “Snow White” into a tale that hinges on race and cultural ideas about beauty - the danger of mirrors indeed - Oyeyemi finds a new, raw power in the classic. If the reader hasn’t figured it out, this turning point makes it clear that Oyeyemi is reworking “Snow White” and that the famously pretty, beleaguered title character may not have had all the information. “And the sooner understand that, the better.” Love, that magical power, makes Boy protective and destructive at once. “Snow is not the fairest of them all,” Boy insists.

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi