The Icarus Girl, by Helen Oyeyemi, explores the strange and sometimes frightning life of eight year-old Jessamy "Jess" Harrison, a sensitive and alienated girl with a Nigerian mother, Sarah, and an English father, Daniel, who meets another equally (if not more) strange young girl on a family trip to her mother's former home in Nigeria.
Once in Nigeria, Jess continues to feel out of place, but is drawn to the presence of an odd girl, Titiola (or "TillyTilly"), who appears to have mysterious powers and who Jess catches drawing a frightening picture of a woman with long arms that reach to her ankles. Although they part ways, TillyTilly assures Jess, "You'll see me again."
Jess returns to London and finds it no more hospitable to her quirks than before. TillyTilly shows up shortly, claiming that her family has moved her to London. This is when things begin to get very scary: TillyTilly behaves wildly and irrationally the longer she is around Jess, and Jess eventually comes to realize that she is the only one who can see the girl. TillyTilly informs Jess that she had a stillborn twin named Fern, a story that is corroborated by Jess' parents; her parents then share the Nigerian belief that twins may exist in the real world, the spirit world, and the Bush, and that a wooden carving should have been made to represent the dead twin and to protect the living one (an action which Jess' parents failed to appropriately take).
TillyTilly begins to injure people and threatens to take over Jess' body and mind completely; her actions and desperation escalates until the inconclusive ending of the book, in which Jess is thrown into a coma after a serious car accident and finds herself wandering around, unable to distinguish between or wholly reach the "real world" and the "Bush" lands that twins have access to.
This ending--as well as the continued conflict between Jess and TillyTilly throughout the book--suggest a crisis of identity and double consciousness that cannot quite be resolved.
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