As a child, Miranda Silver developed pica, a rare eating disorder that causes its victims to consume non-edible substances. The death of her mother when Miranda is 16 exacerbates her condition; nothing, however, satisfies a strange hunger passed down through the women in her family. And then there's the family house in Dover, England, converted to a bed and breakfast by Miranda's father. It manifests a conscious malice toward strangers, dispatching those visitors it despises.

"This eloquent narrative delivers grandly on the promise of Oyeyemi's startling debut The Icarus Girl ... Oyeyemi's languid cadences are moreburnished, her sinuous ideas more firmly embedded in the fabric of this disturbing and intricate novel. The dark tones of Poe in her haunting have also the elasticity of Haruki Murakami's surreal mental landscapes. White is for Witching has the subtle occlusions of her previous two works with a tenacious undertow, drawing the reader into its deeper currents."
—The Independent

"Spooky and thought provoking...The Poe-like elements of White Is for Witching are so spookily vivid, from foreboding descriptions of landscape ("The sun was setting into storm clouds; there was smoky brightness outside, as if the world was being inspected by candlelight") to the eeriness of an enchanted apple (half "coma white" and a red that "glowed like false fire"), that they tend steal the show. But Oyeyemi also has a convincing touch when dealing with ordinary reality. She's particularly sharp at portraying the inner life of a troubled adolescent and the alienation of immigrants. (In the dining room at Cambridge, Ore looks up at the portraits of past masters on the walls and feels, "here was the same man over and over, crouched in old boxes, readying himself to spit in my plate.") As adept as she is at the Gothic, Oyeyemi also subverts its conventions. Here white is the colour of bewitchment and evil spells, not black. Yet the palpable aura of claustrophobic dread and menace urges the reader to conclude that the author casts the most powerful spell."
—The Toronto Star