Boy, Snow, Bird
Ratings29
Average rating3.4
From the prizewinning author of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Gingerbread, and Peaces comes a brilliant recasting of the Snow White fairy tale as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity.
In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. She marries Arturo Whitman, a local widower, and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow.
A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African-Americans passing for white. And even as Boy, Snow, and Bird are divided, their estrangement is complicated by an insistent curiosity about one another. In seeking an understanding that is separate from the image each presents to the world, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.
Dazzlingly inventive and powerfully moving, Boy, Snow, Bird is an astonishing and enchanting novel. With breathtaking feats of imagination, Helen Oyeyemi confirms her place as one of the most original and dynamic literary voices of our time.
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Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy.
About identities (race, gender, etc.), and how what we see of someone is not everything there is to that person. This was so weird and difficult to read, I'm surprised I didn't drop this lol. And that twist in the end was quite problematic to me
I read this for the Luther Seminary Book Club. Most of Boy, Snow, Bird is narrated by Boy Novak, a tough blonde girl raised by an abusive, rat catcher father in New York City. She escapes to a small town in Massachusetts and sets about creating a life for herself there, with a kind of fast talking Hollywood dame bravado. The tone of the book is somewhat frothy–you don't doubt that Boy is equal to her challenges.
But Boy marries a widower with a beautiful and beloved daughter, Snow, and gives birth to her own daughter, Bird. Suddenly it's not Boy's well-being you're concerned about anymore.
This story is presented as a reworking of the Snow White fairy tale, and there is a lot that is fairy tale like about it. There is the glimmer of the supernatural at work on the periphery, in small details like Bird and Snow occasionally not appearing in mirrors, and the mysterious lookalike woman Boy meets on an empty road near the beginning of the book. There's the fairy godmother figure in the person of the cranky middle aged widow who runs the bookstore.
There is also hard reality in this fairy tale–the legacy of racism for light skinned African Americans who could “pass” for white, and the hurt in those families for the members who could not pass.
There was so much potential for a really great book, but I thought it failed to deliver. Instead of working out the tangles of Boy's new family by marriage, it asks us to accept that those tangles simply dissolve, while we are diverted back to Boy's beginnings with the rat catcher. Details which seemed significant earlier are dismissed without further development. The ending was a disappointment.
