Title: Boy,
Snow, Bird
Author: Helen
Oyeyemi
Publisher: Riverhead
Publication Date: March
6, 2014
Genres: Historical
Fiction, Fantasy
Reviewed by: Ellen
Fritz
Ellen’s rating: 2/5
SUMMARY
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 a local widower
and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman.
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. Among them, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.
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. Among them, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.
REVIEW
Thinking that the fairy tale aspect as well as the
enigmatic reference to mirrors would make it an interesting, even fascinating
read, I quite eagerly started reading Boy,
Snow, Bird. I'm sorry to say that I was rather sadly disappointed. Boy leaves
her abusive parent for life in a small town and a marriage that seems to turn
sour after a few years. Although Boy - really a girl - is a bit of a typical
stepmother, her daughter, Bird, makes an effort to befriend her estranged
stepsister, the beautiful and completely white, Snow.
Excellent classics like To Kill a Mocking Bird and The
Help notwithstanding, books concerning the color question have never been
among my favorite reading material. The author uses the Snow White fairy tale
to emphasize the color issue in this book—a clever ploy if stories about said
color issue is within the reader's interest.
Unless the matter of both Bird and Snow not always
appearing in all mirrors at all times is a metaphor for something, I simply
didn't get that part of the story. I did, however, enjoy Bird's fascination
with spiders. That, together with her upbeat, often hilariously funny,
narrating voice during the middle part of the book, gave her an outstanding
character.
Other characters like Mia, Boy's best friend, as well
as both the grandmothers are unique and well fleshed out and contribute to the
telling of this story.
The weird, but wickedly unexpected plot twist right at
the end, though criticized by many, actually redeemed this book for me.
Although this book is not for me, it is clearly an
excellent literary work that retells the fairy tale of Snow White while skillfully
and tastefully touching on the color question within families and communities
in the sixties.
ABOUT the AUTHOR
Helen Oyeyemi is a
British novelist and playwright. She was born in Nigeria in 1984 and raised in
London. She wrote her widely acclaimed first novel, The Icarus Girl, before her
nineteenth birthday; she graduated from Cambridge University in 2006, where she
studied social and political sciences. In 2013 she was included in the Granta
Best Of Young British Novelists list.
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