Boy, Snow, Bird

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.