Book Reviews
In the folk tale, Mr. Fox lures women into his lair to kill them. Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox used to lure women into his stories and kill them. She, of course, is her own Mr. Fox, and surely she lures us in, too. Not to kill us, not to repel us, but the opposite—to hold us in these stories and give us something along the way, something complicated and genuine. Charm is a quality that overflows in this novel, and it works under its best definition: as a kind of magical attraction and delight. Oyeyemi casts her word-spell, sentence by sentence, story by story, and by the end, the oppressive lair has opened up into a shimmering landscape pulsing with life.
Aimee Bender - New York Times Book Review
[A] postmodern puzzler that, despite its screwball moments, is inspired by the pre-modern: the bloody and bizarre English folk tale "Mister Fox," Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" and the Grimm Brothers' "Fitcher's Bird" and "The Robber Bridegroom"… Violence is never far away in this ambitious effort, but neither is love (romantic, sexual, parental), and Oyeyemi's dazzling, dislocating novel ends with an elemental tale of transformation.
Kerry Fried - Washington Post
This, Oyeyemi’s fourth novel, is also formally her riskiest. Oyeyemi has an eye for the gently perverse, the odd detail that turns the ordinary marvelously, frighteningly strange.... Narrated in an almost childishly rhythmic, simple prose, the stories draw from a wide swath of literary registers—a boy tries to assemble a woman out of art; a vicious Harlequin killer sits chained beneath a lake; a girl in an occupied village rebels against foreign soldiers; a neophyte writer corresponds with an author she admires.... Yet stories, and fairy tales in particular, allow for metamorphosis, and it is through becoming writers and narrators that the women of this story liberate themselves from Mr. Fox’s deadly plotline
Jenny Hendrix - Boston Globe
Heroines don't live happily ever after in Mr. Fox's books because he can't help killing them off. Then his muse, Mary, comes to life and drags him into a world of make-believe that tests both the limits of the genre and the idea of a lifelong bond. Oyeyemi consistently surprises (her White Is for Witching won the 2010 Somerset Maugham Award). Get for discriminating readers and watch where this one goes.
Library Journal
Postmodernist, meta-fictional riffs on classic tales.... The Mr. Fox of the title...novelist who kills off his heroines... is visited with increasing frequency by his imaginary but alluring muse Mary. Mary is dissatisfied with Mr. Fox's treatment of women and challenges him, very vaguely, to a contest.... [F]orget any resemblance to linear logic in what is ultimately a treatise on love.
Kirkus Reviews