Icarus Girl is the story of a British girl named Jessamy who visits her extended family in Nigeria, and returns with a rather shadowy problem. That problem is a big question mark: a girl who might be a ghost, or might be a figment of Jessamy’s imagination, or might be something else entirely. She is something of a doppelganger for Jessamy, and a nebulously malicious one at that; suitably, Jessamy gives her a nickname that is itself a double, TillyTilly.

This story is a spooky one, and it’s inspired by Yoruban folk tales obsessed with the concept of a doppelgangers who appear in the form of evil spirits. The book’s title is clearly an illusion to a very different story, the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, which is centered on the possibility of flight and the sin of hubris. If anything Icarus Girl is something of a dualistic complement to the Icarus myth, since it is centered on the terror of the underworld and the sin of disappearance: first and foremost Jessamy’s childish wish to remain invisible, isolated.

There are all sorts of other duals in this story, indeed it is something of an overdone theme. Jessamy has two names, a British and a Yoruban one; likewise she has two families. TillyTilly has two names; she has two personalities to match, a benevolently playful one and a terrifying and forthrightly malevolent one. Jessamy seems to live in two different worlds - the visible, tangible one made up of people and places that everyone else recognizes; and an invisible one in her own mind, the one which Yoruban folk tales refer to as “the bush”.

It’s difficult to make much sense of this book, I think partly because the plot itself is so spooky and unforgiving. The theme of duals and doppelgangers is by its nature abstract, and I’m not sure the book does much to make it more concrete. At the same time, it’s a fascinating take on an ancient theme, certainly one which was new to me.