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Boy, Snow, Bird
BOY Novak turns twenty and decides to try for a brand-new life. Flax Hill, Massachusetts, isn’t exactly a welcoming town, but it does have the virtue of being the last stop on the bus route she took from New York. Flax Hill is also the hometown of Arturo Whitman—craftsman, widower, and father of Snow. SNOW is mild-mannered, radiant and deeply cherished—exactly the sort of little girl Boy never was, and Boy is utterly beguiled by her. If Snow displays a certain inscrutability at times, that’s simply a characteristic she shares with her father, harmless until Boy gives birth to Snow’s sister, Bird. When BIRD is born Boy is forced to re-evaluate the image Arturo’s family have presented to her, and Boy, Snow and Bird are broken apart. Sparkling with wit and vibrancy, Boy, Snow, Bird is a deeply moving novel about three women and the strange connection between them. It confirms Helen Oyeyemi’s place as one of the most original and dynamic literary voices of her generation.
308 pages, Hardcover
First published August 27, 2013
About the author
Helen Oyeyemi
32 books5,088 followersHelen Oyeyemi is a British novelist. She lives in Prague with an ever-increasing perfume wardrobe- let’s just say the bottle count exceeds 150 but is less than 350- and has written ten books so far, none of which involve ‘magical realism’. (Can’t fiction sometimes get extra fictional without being called such names?!) Number One Daydream these days: writing a novel or story that inspires a fragrance.
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March 12, 2024
***SPOILERS HIDDEN***
Boy, Snow, Bird is part of a growing trend among recently published books: books whose blurbs make them sound more appealing than they actually are. It belongs unequivocally alongside deep disappointments such as The Age of Ice and The Night Circus. Getting dubbed a “re-telling of Snow White,” doesn't help. I'll be clear about this upfront: In no way can Boy, Snow, Bird be classified as a fairy tale re-telling (and possibly Oyeyemi never intended it to be one). In this case “fairy tale re-telling” is only a marketing ploy. Readers coming to this book looking for a twist on Snow White will be disappointed.
This isn’t a horrible book, but it is a waste of time. It's supposed to be an examination of race relations in 1950s America as they play out in the small town of Flax Hill, Massachusetts. In reality it's a superficial treatment of a psychologically complex topic told from the perspectives of two half-baked characters. This book lacks that punch to the gut that guarantees a story will be unforgettable. It tells more than it shows; its dialogue never rings true (it’s unlikely a thirteen-year-old will speak exactly the same as a twenty-something); its many characters aren’t distinctive; the organization is scattered and confused; but most unfortunate of all is that Boy, Snow, Bird lacks emotional depth. There's simply nothing memorable about this book, and that's largely because the story can’t be felt. Somehow Oyeyemi failed to strike any emotional chords--astonishing, really, given the topic. I, a deeply empathetic reader, felt emotionally detached.
As for specific plot details, in the interest of brevity I'll single out only the most egregious. Boy’s husband, Arturo, is supposed to be the catalyst for the book’s main drama, the person on the receiving end of Boy’s resentment, a controversial figure who stirs up a whirlwind of strife and tension in most, if not all, his scenes with Boy. Instead he’s a bland utterance here, a gesture there. His romance with Boy is so rushed--not to mention passionless--I thought some pages of my book had been ripped out. There’s little to this limp character, and as such, he's meaningless.
Oyeyemi thoughtfully crafted Boy and her daughter Bird, although both still lacked enough dimension to keep me more than mildly interested. Oyeyemi’s creative decision to Additionally, the many supporting characters blend into an indistinct whole. There are simply too many, with not enough for them to do, and I struggled to remember who was who.
Boy, Snow, Bird strains to go to that next level. Oyeyemi enjoyed using symbolism, but she used too heavy a hand throughout. (There’s no missing the meaning behind Boy’s snake bracelet anyway, but should that happen, the cover illustration offers a strong hint.) The book’s second half is epistolary, an excuse to information dump family history that makes for boring reading. Around the final twenty-five pages, this book completely loses its footing with the absurd introduction of a transgender story line. Just when I was expecting the focus to sharpen, Boy, Snow, Bird morphs into another book. A new Snow White this most definitely is not.
The blurb doesn't accurately describe the product. Boy, Snow, Bird doesn't know what it's supposed to be. Readers searching for books that explore race relations more expertly and with emotional resonance should skip this and look elsewhere.
NOTE: I received this as an Advance Reader Copy from LibraryThing in February 2014.
Boy, Snow, Bird is part of a growing trend among recently published books: books whose blurbs make them sound more appealing than they actually are. It belongs unequivocally alongside deep disappointments such as The Age of Ice and The Night Circus. Getting dubbed a “re-telling of Snow White,” doesn't help. I'll be clear about this upfront: In no way can Boy, Snow, Bird be classified as a fairy tale re-telling (and possibly Oyeyemi never intended it to be one). In this case “fairy tale re-telling” is only a marketing ploy. Readers coming to this book looking for a twist on Snow White will be disappointed.
This isn’t a horrible book, but it is a waste of time. It's supposed to be an examination of race relations in 1950s America as they play out in the small town of Flax Hill, Massachusetts. In reality it's a superficial treatment of a psychologically complex topic told from the perspectives of two half-baked characters. This book lacks that punch to the gut that guarantees a story will be unforgettable. It tells more than it shows; its dialogue never rings true (it’s unlikely a thirteen-year-old will speak exactly the same as a twenty-something); its many characters aren’t distinctive; the organization is scattered and confused; but most unfortunate of all is that Boy, Snow, Bird lacks emotional depth. There's simply nothing memorable about this book, and that's largely because the story can’t be felt. Somehow Oyeyemi failed to strike any emotional chords--astonishing, really, given the topic. I, a deeply empathetic reader, felt emotionally detached.
As for specific plot details, in the interest of brevity I'll single out only the most egregious. Boy’s husband, Arturo, is supposed to be the catalyst for the book’s main drama, the person on the receiving end of Boy’s resentment, a controversial figure who stirs up a whirlwind of strife and tension in most, if not all, his scenes with Boy. Instead he’s a bland utterance here, a gesture there. His romance with Boy is so rushed--not to mention passionless--I thought some pages of my book had been ripped out. There’s little to this limp character, and as such, he's meaningless.
Oyeyemi thoughtfully crafted Boy and her daughter Bird, although both still lacked enough dimension to keep me more than mildly interested. Oyeyemi’s creative decision to Additionally, the many supporting characters blend into an indistinct whole. There are simply too many, with not enough for them to do, and I struggled to remember who was who.
Boy, Snow, Bird strains to go to that next level. Oyeyemi enjoyed using symbolism, but she used too heavy a hand throughout. (There’s no missing the meaning behind Boy’s snake bracelet anyway, but should that happen, the cover illustration offers a strong hint.) The book’s second half is epistolary, an excuse to information dump family history that makes for boring reading. Around the final twenty-five pages, this book completely loses its footing with the absurd introduction of a transgender story line. Just when I was expecting the focus to sharpen, Boy, Snow, Bird morphs into another book. A new Snow White this most definitely is not.
The blurb doesn't accurately describe the product. Boy, Snow, Bird doesn't know what it's supposed to be. Readers searching for books that explore race relations more expertly and with emotional resonance should skip this and look elsewhere.
NOTE: I received this as an Advance Reader Copy from LibraryThing in February 2014.
March 5, 2014
Once upon a time, there was a girl who left her home and traveled to a cold land far, far away. Sometimes she was very sad, and once she fell down a dark well, and no one knew if she would get out, but she did. She wrote a book and sold it for a pot of gold. People said, “Surely, she is one of the best young writers in the realm,” and she wrote happily ever after.
That fairy-tale version of Helen Oyeyemi’s life is hard to resist. The Nigerian-born British writer has wrestled with cultural dislocation and severe depression, but the outline of her remarkable career glimmers with pixie dust. Since writing “The Icarus Girl” — before she was 20 — she’s dazzled critics with stories laced with myth, magic and legend.
Her latest novel, “Boy, Snow, Bird,” continues on this bewitching path, winding along the edge of the forest of make-believe. “Nobody ever warned me about mirrors,” begins a 15-year-old girl named Boy. She’s the only child of a grotesquely violent father who catches rats for a living. Their lives are colored by the nightmarish hues of folk tales but rooted in the real-life details of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the late 1940s. As opposed to the surrealism of Aimee Bender, Oyeyemi seems determined to maintain a kind of magical deniability. When she mentions giants or unicorns or talking spiders, she’s only speaking metaphorically — right? — but the atmosphere of fantasy lingers over these pages like some intoxicating incense.
Just as the story starts to vibrate between Grimm fairy tale and grim child abuse, Boy runs away to a town in Massachusetts called Flax Hill, where “people make beautiful things.” Among these artists and artisans, she finds an apartment, picks up odd jobs and eventually starts working at a thriving bookstore. (How’s that for a fantasy!) Her new friends are other young women starting careers and looking for husbands — a life just as plain and earthbound as you please. But catch that teasing scent of the fantastical wafting back in. At the town bakery, the little figures on top of the wedding cakes smile “the kind smile that suggested dark magic was afoot.” And Boy, recalling a walk home from a date, says: “One of the bigger houses had brambles growing up the front of it in snakelike vines. The smell of baking chocolate-chip cookies aside, it looked like a house you could start fanciful rumors about: ‘Well, a princess has been asleep there for hundreds of years.’ ” And then, as though invoked by Boy’s allusion, a little girl appears holding “a large cookie in each hand and more in the pockets of her dress. . . . I just said ‘Hi, Snow’ as if we’d met before, when of course we hadn’t, and I kept going, kept my gaze fixed on the road ahead of me. ‘Scared’ doesn’t even really describe it. I almost crossed myself. I felt like the evil eye had fallen upon us both.”
That pretty, motherless girl living in the forest is named Snow Whitman, which I feared might be the start of some fey restaging of “Snow White”: heigh-ho, heigh-ho to allegory we go! (“Boy, Snow, Bird” is less sentimental than Eowyn Ivey’s “The Snow Child,” a more faithful fairy-tale reimagining that was a finalist for last year’s Pulitzer Prize in fiction.) But I don’t care what the magic mirror says; Oyeyemi is the cleverest in the land. As this story develops, Boy finds herself cast as the wicked stepmother, and her relationship to Snow stirs up old misgivings about her own beauty and value. Can Boy ever recover from her father’s savage insistence that she’s secretly evil? Can she ever learn to trust a little girl who “looks like a friend to woodland creatures”? Is there something manufactured, something manipulative about Snow’s “radiant, innocent virtue”? With such questions, Oyeyemi aggravates our anxieties about maternal jealousy and the limits of parental love, subjects we’ve been trained from childhood to consider in black and white.
As civil rights protests burn across distant parts of the country, Flax Hill maintains its flinty, New England demeanor. But this novel about a white town in Massachusetts is not nearly so monochromatic as it first appears. Keep an eye out for stray references to Emmett Till, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” and those smart black kids who hang out in Boy’s bookstore. Oyeyemi proves herself a daring and unnerving writer about race. This isn’t one more earnest novel to reward white liberals for their enlightenment. (Insert your favorite bookclub title here.) “Boy, Snow, Bird” wants to draw us into the dark woods of America’s racial consciousness, where fantasies of purity and contamination still lurk. Under Oyeyemi’s spell, the fairy-tale conceit makes a brilliant setting in which to explore the alchemy of racism, the weird ways in which identity can be transmuted in an instant — from beauty to beast or vice versa.
Beware what you read about this deceptive and deceptively simple story. (Granta published an excerpt last year that gives nothing away.) The plot turns on a few surprising revelations that will be easily crushed by careless summaries — like, I’m sorry to note, the one on this dust jacket. The book is pocked by the same lacunae that make ancient stories so unsettling. Admittedly, its thematic murkiness will strike some readers as frustrating. But while staying rooted in a largely modern, realistic setting, Oyeyemi captures that unresolvable strangeness in the original fairy tales that later editors — from Grimm to Disney — sanded away. As Boy says, “No revelation is immediate, not if it’s real.”
This is real.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
That fairy-tale version of Helen Oyeyemi’s life is hard to resist. The Nigerian-born British writer has wrestled with cultural dislocation and severe depression, but the outline of her remarkable career glimmers with pixie dust. Since writing “The Icarus Girl” — before she was 20 — she’s dazzled critics with stories laced with myth, magic and legend.
Her latest novel, “Boy, Snow, Bird,” continues on this bewitching path, winding along the edge of the forest of make-believe. “Nobody ever warned me about mirrors,” begins a 15-year-old girl named Boy. She’s the only child of a grotesquely violent father who catches rats for a living. Their lives are colored by the nightmarish hues of folk tales but rooted in the real-life details of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the late 1940s. As opposed to the surrealism of Aimee Bender, Oyeyemi seems determined to maintain a kind of magical deniability. When she mentions giants or unicorns or talking spiders, she’s only speaking metaphorically — right? — but the atmosphere of fantasy lingers over these pages like some intoxicating incense.
Just as the story starts to vibrate between Grimm fairy tale and grim child abuse, Boy runs away to a town in Massachusetts called Flax Hill, where “people make beautiful things.” Among these artists and artisans, she finds an apartment, picks up odd jobs and eventually starts working at a thriving bookstore. (How’s that for a fantasy!) Her new friends are other young women starting careers and looking for husbands — a life just as plain and earthbound as you please. But catch that teasing scent of the fantastical wafting back in. At the town bakery, the little figures on top of the wedding cakes smile “the kind smile that suggested dark magic was afoot.” And Boy, recalling a walk home from a date, says: “One of the bigger houses had brambles growing up the front of it in snakelike vines. The smell of baking chocolate-chip cookies aside, it looked like a house you could start fanciful rumors about: ‘Well, a princess has been asleep there for hundreds of years.’ ” And then, as though invoked by Boy’s allusion, a little girl appears holding “a large cookie in each hand and more in the pockets of her dress. . . . I just said ‘Hi, Snow’ as if we’d met before, when of course we hadn’t, and I kept going, kept my gaze fixed on the road ahead of me. ‘Scared’ doesn’t even really describe it. I almost crossed myself. I felt like the evil eye had fallen upon us both.”
That pretty, motherless girl living in the forest is named Snow Whitman, which I feared might be the start of some fey restaging of “Snow White”: heigh-ho, heigh-ho to allegory we go! (“Boy, Snow, Bird” is less sentimental than Eowyn Ivey’s “The Snow Child,” a more faithful fairy-tale reimagining that was a finalist for last year’s Pulitzer Prize in fiction.) But I don’t care what the magic mirror says; Oyeyemi is the cleverest in the land. As this story develops, Boy finds herself cast as the wicked stepmother, and her relationship to Snow stirs up old misgivings about her own beauty and value. Can Boy ever recover from her father’s savage insistence that she’s secretly evil? Can she ever learn to trust a little girl who “looks like a friend to woodland creatures”? Is there something manufactured, something manipulative about Snow’s “radiant, innocent virtue”? With such questions, Oyeyemi aggravates our anxieties about maternal jealousy and the limits of parental love, subjects we’ve been trained from childhood to consider in black and white.
As civil rights protests burn across distant parts of the country, Flax Hill maintains its flinty, New England demeanor. But this novel about a white town in Massachusetts is not nearly so monochromatic as it first appears. Keep an eye out for stray references to Emmett Till, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” and those smart black kids who hang out in Boy’s bookstore. Oyeyemi proves herself a daring and unnerving writer about race. This isn’t one more earnest novel to reward white liberals for their enlightenment. (Insert your favorite bookclub title here.) “Boy, Snow, Bird” wants to draw us into the dark woods of America’s racial consciousness, where fantasies of purity and contamination still lurk. Under Oyeyemi’s spell, the fairy-tale conceit makes a brilliant setting in which to explore the alchemy of racism, the weird ways in which identity can be transmuted in an instant — from beauty to beast or vice versa.
Beware what you read about this deceptive and deceptively simple story. (Granta published an excerpt last year that gives nothing away.) The plot turns on a few surprising revelations that will be easily crushed by careless summaries — like, I’m sorry to note, the one on this dust jacket. The book is pocked by the same lacunae that make ancient stories so unsettling. Admittedly, its thematic murkiness will strike some readers as frustrating. But while staying rooted in a largely modern, realistic setting, Oyeyemi captures that unresolvable strangeness in the original fairy tales that later editors — from Grimm to Disney — sanded away. As Boy says, “No revelation is immediate, not if it’s real.”
This is real.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
December 17, 2022
On the one hand, this was incredibly written, and up until the last two chapters I thought it was going to make my faves-of-2014 list.
But then we had SERIOUSLY dubious transgender issues, for no discernible purpose, and now I don't know how to rate this one.
Five stars for almost everything...and one for really, REALLY crappy handling of trans issues.
:edit:
No, I'm giving this one star. Because the more I think about this the more angry I get about it. I don't see any excuse for what Oyeyemi stated/implied about trans issues and I'm not inclined to forgive her for it.
But then we had SERIOUSLY dubious transgender issues, for no discernible purpose, and now I don't know how to rate this one.
Five stars for almost everything...and one for really, REALLY crappy handling of trans issues.
:edit:
No, I'm giving this one star. Because the more I think about this the more angry I get about it. I don't see any excuse for what Oyeyemi stated/implied about trans issues and I'm not inclined to forgive her for it.
August 11, 2016
This is the sort of book that you read on the subway, so engrossed that you only glance up every four or five stops. And every time you look up, you need to quash the urge to grab the person next to you and say, HOLY COW THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD YOU NEED TO READ IT IMMEDIATELY, STRANGER.
On its surface, it is the story of a woman named Boy, who escapes her terrible father and life in New York for a calmer existence north. Boy marries, mothers a step-daughter, finds a best friend who is a writer, and generally takes to her new town as well as possible.
At this point, you're halfway through a completely engrossing and enjoyable story. And then there's a twist, and you start to see what you're really reading about. Somehow, the book gets even more amazing.
Despite all of the praise heaped on her, I'd never read Helen Oyeyemi before. I'll now be wolfing down all of her backlist.
On its surface, it is the story of a woman named Boy, who escapes her terrible father and life in New York for a calmer existence north. Boy marries, mothers a step-daughter, finds a best friend who is a writer, and generally takes to her new town as well as possible.
At this point, you're halfway through a completely engrossing and enjoyable story. And then there's a twist, and you start to see what you're really reading about. Somehow, the book gets even more amazing.
Despite all of the praise heaped on her, I'd never read Helen Oyeyemi before. I'll now be wolfing down all of her backlist.
March 31, 2017
I really could have loved this. Absurd writing and nonsensical storytelling is right up my alley.
Then the second half came...and oh boy...what a mess.
Then the second half came...and oh boy...what a mess.
April 5, 2017
An almost perfect 5 star book ruined by a non-ending. I'm furious. I want to strangle the author.
Ok for a slightly more coherent rant:
Part 1- Boy
The story has connotations of Snow White and Cinderella while being skilfully placed in the 1950s (a nice touch by the author). It is steeped in magical realism. The tone is fearful, dark and muted. It is hard to get a grasp on Boy and although you feel sympathetic towards her the language is distancing. Although it is told in close personal point of view, it doesn't feel like you intimately understand. The mysterious and unfathomable elements of her personality dovetail nicely with the underlining terror Boy feels and the more mystical elements.
Core Themes: Abuse, Influence of the Past on the Present, Secrets, Deconstruction of "Beauty".
Part 2- Bird
Bird is Boy's daughter. Race features prominently as do family secrets. the magical realism was more pronounced but for no good purpose that I could discern. The sophisticated deconstruction go Beauty in part 1 is largely undone in this section in the plot. The suggestion that Boy is possibly a malevolent force is explored then promptly discarded. Their are very interesting aspects of Bird's story related to the reaction her family has to her blackness.
Core Themes: Race, Truth, Bloodlines
Part 3- Clusterfuck
I just don't know what happened. All of the weird but wonderful magical realism elements are largely dropped/ left unexplored. A weird transexual story is introduced that suggests transitioning to a transgender identity is done at as a result of sexual assault. An abortion is brought up and abandoned. The sisters, Snow and Bird, met and show their worst sides. A mystery is introduced and abandoned. Family drama arising from one of the shocking central twists from part 2 is explored but not much is said. The reader is largely asked to observe without any conclusions being drawn.
Core Themes: Betrayal, Identity, Self-Inflicted Suffering, Family
Any one of these stories would have been fascinating and satisfying. But all three together made for an incoherent mess. I had no idea what the author was trying to say.
What made this even more frustrating was it was clear I was in the hands of an incredibly skilled writer. Tension, conflict and prose was utter perfection. I was constantly hooked in by the narrative. I didn't have to remind myself to stop and pick up quotes. The sheer beauty of them forced me to pause and admire. The social commentary was biting, sharp and achingly painful.
So how did it go so wrong?
Essentially, the novel is plotless. The author had a lot of good ideas. She raised a lot of mysteries, a lot of conflict and drama…. But none of it went anywhere. At the last moment the author seemed to back away from everything her characters, prose and narrative were trying to say.
In the end the entire novel was devoid of meaning.
It was like a still life. Perfectly drawn, beautiful but in essence… just a bowl of carefully arranged fruit.
If you love beautiful prose I would suggest you read it anyway. If you mostly read for story- avoid like the plague.
NOTE: Another reviewer suggested you read The Help or To Kill a Mockingbird instead if you want a book about POC… umm no.
Don't read stories about POC told thru the eyes of white people. If you want to read stories about POC then actually read stories about POC not their white friends, employers or lawyers… work by Octavia E. Butler is probably a good place to start.
Ok for a slightly more coherent rant:
Part 1- Boy
The story has connotations of Snow White and Cinderella while being skilfully placed in the 1950s (a nice touch by the author). It is steeped in magical realism. The tone is fearful, dark and muted. It is hard to get a grasp on Boy and although you feel sympathetic towards her the language is distancing. Although it is told in close personal point of view, it doesn't feel like you intimately understand. The mysterious and unfathomable elements of her personality dovetail nicely with the underlining terror Boy feels and the more mystical elements.
Core Themes: Abuse, Influence of the Past on the Present, Secrets, Deconstruction of "Beauty".
Part 2- Bird
Bird is Boy's daughter. Race features prominently as do family secrets. the magical realism was more pronounced but for no good purpose that I could discern. The sophisticated deconstruction go Beauty in part 1 is largely undone in this section in the plot. The suggestion that Boy is possibly a malevolent force is explored then promptly discarded. Their are very interesting aspects of Bird's story related to the reaction her family has to her blackness.
Core Themes: Race, Truth, Bloodlines
Part 3- Clusterfuck
I just don't know what happened. All of the weird but wonderful magical realism elements are largely dropped/ left unexplored. A weird transexual story is introduced that suggests transitioning to a transgender identity is done at as a result of sexual assault. An abortion is brought up and abandoned. The sisters, Snow and Bird, met and show their worst sides. A mystery is introduced and abandoned. Family drama arising from one of the shocking central twists from part 2 is explored but not much is said. The reader is largely asked to observe without any conclusions being drawn.
Core Themes: Betrayal, Identity, Self-Inflicted Suffering, Family
Any one of these stories would have been fascinating and satisfying. But all three together made for an incoherent mess. I had no idea what the author was trying to say.
What made this even more frustrating was it was clear I was in the hands of an incredibly skilled writer. Tension, conflict and prose was utter perfection. I was constantly hooked in by the narrative. I didn't have to remind myself to stop and pick up quotes. The sheer beauty of them forced me to pause and admire. The social commentary was biting, sharp and achingly painful.
So how did it go so wrong?
Essentially, the novel is plotless. The author had a lot of good ideas. She raised a lot of mysteries, a lot of conflict and drama…. But none of it went anywhere. At the last moment the author seemed to back away from everything her characters, prose and narrative were trying to say.
In the end the entire novel was devoid of meaning.
It was like a still life. Perfectly drawn, beautiful but in essence… just a bowl of carefully arranged fruit.
If you love beautiful prose I would suggest you read it anyway. If you mostly read for story- avoid like the plague.
NOTE: Another reviewer suggested you read The Help or To Kill a Mockingbird instead if you want a book about POC… umm no.
Don't read stories about POC told thru the eyes of white people. If you want to read stories about POC then actually read stories about POC not their white friends, employers or lawyers… work by Octavia E. Butler is probably a good place to start.
Read
July 19, 2018A beautiful book about ugly things. I really liked a lot about it, but I found the treatment of a particular issue near the ending (discussed under spoiler tags below) to be too brief and too superficial, and it took away from the book's strengths.
Boy Novak is a girl with a smart mouth, a crazy-making beauty, and a motherless, grim childhood that sends her fleeing from her New York City home. She winds up in tiny Flax Hill, Massachusetts, an idyllic town known for its legions of artisans, a place that values beauty and that trades in beautiful things. Its most idyllic and beautiful resident (y'know, the fairest of them all) is Snow Whitman, a dreamy princess of a little girl who eventually becomes Boy's stepdaughter. Boy never assumed that marrying into the Whitmans--flinty, upright, hard-nosed, and still haunted by the loss of Snow's gorgeous mother--would be easy, but she finds her family relationships growing more complicated with the birth of her dark-skinned daughter, Bird. It's 1953, and while race relations are treacherous even in a fairy tale town, the most central pain here is centered on, and passed down by, the same source that often centers and passes down the color of own's skin: family.
I really like how Helen Oyeyemi uses fairy tales in her work. There are no straight re-tellings or tedious modern day "updates"; instead, she breaks a tale apart and uses some of the shiniest pieces in a mosaic that draws attention to the narrative patterns that become literal forces in our lives. In Mr. Fox, she kept rearranging elements of the Bluebeard story to examine the consequences of how we tell stories about violence against women, and here in Boy, Snow, Bird, she's looking at how race and identity and selfhood are invented and interpreted, all by fracturing the familiar Snow White mythos of beauty and purity and, quite interestingly, motherhood.
Boy, Snow, Bird is a story about passing, and overlaying a magical-realist fairy tale of deceitful mirrors and doubles makes perfect sense. W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness ("this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity") gets to the heart of what kind of work and what kind of pain is involved in passing, and the mirrors--literal and metaphorical--at work within the world of BSB are not neutral, passive objects. This story is set in the 1950s and 1960s, but the work being done here about identity is still severely relevant, even if contemporary racism doesn't always take the same form as it did then. While the principal character in this story is white Boy, this isn't a white person's white-savior story in which racism is the backdrop for the story of a white person's coming of age. There is not enough vomit in the world to express my reaction to seeing The Help and To Kill a Mockingbird and similar books being recommended as better stories about racism than this one; Ron Charles's Washington Post review expresses more elegantly how I feel about this: "This isn't one more earnest novel to reward white liberals for their enlightenment. (Insert your favorite bookclub title here.) Boy, Snow, Bird wants to draw us into the dark woods of America's racial consciousness, where fantasies of purity and contamination still lurk." Yep. Oyeyemi brings into multiple points of view as to what is gained and what is lost by those who choose to pass and those who don't, and even if Boy and whiteness are at the heart of the story, Oyeyemi continually complicates Boy's role there.
The writing is magnetic--I'd point to the book's opening sentence and the opening paragraph as good representatives of Oyeyemi's style--and I was engaged by both Boy's and Bird's sections. I also loved the letters exchanged by Bird and Snow, and while I wished for a section narrated by Snow, I think her voice still came through, and the fact that it was filtered by other character's experiences of her was part of the POINT.
However, there was an aspect to this book that I found problematic, and that I don't know how to digest, primarily because it occurs in the final pages of the book.
FTC Disclosure: I received an advance review copy of this book from the publisher.
Boy Novak is a girl with a smart mouth, a crazy-making beauty, and a motherless, grim childhood that sends her fleeing from her New York City home. She winds up in tiny Flax Hill, Massachusetts, an idyllic town known for its legions of artisans, a place that values beauty and that trades in beautiful things. Its most idyllic and beautiful resident (y'know, the fairest of them all) is Snow Whitman, a dreamy princess of a little girl who eventually becomes Boy's stepdaughter. Boy never assumed that marrying into the Whitmans--flinty, upright, hard-nosed, and still haunted by the loss of Snow's gorgeous mother--would be easy, but she finds her family relationships growing more complicated with the birth of her dark-skinned daughter, Bird. It's 1953, and while race relations are treacherous even in a fairy tale town, the most central pain here is centered on, and passed down by, the same source that often centers and passes down the color of own's skin: family.
I really like how Helen Oyeyemi uses fairy tales in her work. There are no straight re-tellings or tedious modern day "updates"; instead, she breaks a tale apart and uses some of the shiniest pieces in a mosaic that draws attention to the narrative patterns that become literal forces in our lives. In Mr. Fox, she kept rearranging elements of the Bluebeard story to examine the consequences of how we tell stories about violence against women, and here in Boy, Snow, Bird, she's looking at how race and identity and selfhood are invented and interpreted, all by fracturing the familiar Snow White mythos of beauty and purity and, quite interestingly, motherhood.
Boy, Snow, Bird is a story about passing, and overlaying a magical-realist fairy tale of deceitful mirrors and doubles makes perfect sense. W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness ("this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity") gets to the heart of what kind of work and what kind of pain is involved in passing, and the mirrors--literal and metaphorical--at work within the world of BSB are not neutral, passive objects. This story is set in the 1950s and 1960s, but the work being done here about identity is still severely relevant, even if contemporary racism doesn't always take the same form as it did then. While the principal character in this story is white Boy, this isn't a white person's white-savior story in which racism is the backdrop for the story of a white person's coming of age. There is not enough vomit in the world to express my reaction to seeing The Help and To Kill a Mockingbird and similar books being recommended as better stories about racism than this one; Ron Charles's Washington Post review expresses more elegantly how I feel about this: "This isn't one more earnest novel to reward white liberals for their enlightenment. (Insert your favorite bookclub title here.) Boy, Snow, Bird wants to draw us into the dark woods of America's racial consciousness, where fantasies of purity and contamination still lurk." Yep. Oyeyemi brings into multiple points of view as to what is gained and what is lost by those who choose to pass and those who don't, and even if Boy and whiteness are at the heart of the story, Oyeyemi continually complicates Boy's role there.
The writing is magnetic--I'd point to the book's opening sentence and the opening paragraph as good representatives of Oyeyemi's style--and I was engaged by both Boy's and Bird's sections. I also loved the letters exchanged by Bird and Snow, and while I wished for a section narrated by Snow, I think her voice still came through, and the fact that it was filtered by other character's experiences of her was part of the POINT.
However, there was an aspect to this book that I found problematic, and that I don't know how to digest, primarily because it occurs in the final pages of the book.
FTC Disclosure: I received an advance review copy of this book from the publisher.
August 27, 2014
One time I read a story someone had posted on the internet about how they were drinking a mug of hot cocoa and really enjoying it but when they finished the mug they saw that there had been a cockroach in their drink the whole time. Although my reading of Boy, Snow, Bird didn't end with me retching over a toilet, I would say I felt a similar amount of disgust.
This book was really great, interesting and compelling (if meandering) basically up until the "plot twist", where it shit the bed so tremendously that the force of it knocked my review down to one star. I'm honestly having difficulty coming up with words to express how disappointing it was, but it boils down to a pastiche of "being raped makes you so damaged that you will need other people to pull a spell off of you," "transgender people are traumatized and damaged and that is why they are transgender," "transgender people are evil," and "transgender people need to be fixed, so that they can go back to their 'real' gender." It was like a gut punch of awful right at the end of the book. What the hell? At least a few of these issues could have been fixed if the author hadn't decided that the personality switch had to come with a gender switch, but the whole premise was problematic anyway. If you decide to read this book, do yourself a favor and make up your own damn ending.
This book was really great, interesting and compelling (if meandering) basically up until the "plot twist", where it shit the bed so tremendously that the force of it knocked my review down to one star. I'm honestly having difficulty coming up with words to express how disappointing it was, but it boils down to a pastiche of "being raped makes you so damaged that you will need other people to pull a spell off of you," "transgender people are traumatized and damaged and that is why they are transgender," "transgender people are evil," and "transgender people need to be fixed, so that they can go back to their 'real' gender." It was like a gut punch of awful right at the end of the book. What the hell? At least a few of these issues could have been fixed if the author hadn't decided that the personality switch had to come with a gender switch, but the whole premise was problematic anyway. If you decide to read this book, do yourself a favor and make up your own damn ending.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 24, 2020
Sketches a vivid portrait of the relationship between a white mother and her biracial daughter and step-daughter. Set in postwar New England, the fabulist novel alternates between the three’s perspectives and explores heavy themes such as racial passing, family history, and trauma, in a fantastical, droll style. Full of subplots that end as suddenly as they begin and side characters who appear and disappear on a whim, the work lacks a well-orchestrated story and a strong sense of direction; Oyeyemi has a penchant for the bizarre, and as digressive as the plot is, the narrators’ voices are sharp, all of which makes for a compelling, if disorienting, reading experience. The writing’s mesmerizing until the end, when a needless twist with a reactionary moral sours what’s otherwise an absorbing modern fable.
Read
August 2, 2018I found this beauty of a book in the library and just had to check it out when the cover transfixed my eyes. And with already having read Oyeyemi's What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours in the previous month, I was more than ready to pick up this tale.
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.
I feel like saying that Boy, Snow, Bird is a retelling of Snow White is quite confusing as it's barely that. I mean, sure there are some nods to the original tale, however, less than you would anticipate. I ended up liking the book more for its take on beauty, vanity, and race.
Speaking of, I'm going to continue with the positive aspects of this book, and then towards the end discuss something that really made me feel at unease.
The positives:
• The writing knocked me out of the park. Oyeyemi has exactly the kind of writing style I love i.e. specific as hell.
Just to share some of the love:
“She’s tall too, tall in a way that you only really notice at certain moments. The statues of Greek gods were built two and a half times the size of the average human being; I read that in a book Miss Fairfax lent me. The book describes the magnification as being small enough for the figure to remain familiar, but large enough to make you feel mighty strange standing near it. You sense some imminent threat, but common sense tells you there’s no danger, so you don’t run away. You keep a distance that appears to be a respectful one, and you don’t run away, just keep hovering on the point of doing so.”
Also this:
“Hey, Bird—”
“Yeah?”
“Do I look forty?”
“Forty years old?” I asked, trying to buy time.
“Yes, forty years old.”
Her eyes flicked up toward the rearview mirror. I was sitting in the backseat because she doesn’t like to have anyone sitting next to her while she is driving. She says it makes her feel crowded in.”
• Boy, Snow, Bird was a quick read once invested in the storyline ( about half-way through, for me).
• I picked this up when I really needed a distraction from real life – and it did its job perfectly.
• Sisterly-love. I LOVED how the author took the time to really develop the friendship between the two sisters. Sisterhood is such an important topic for me, and I always appreciate an author that tackles it with the utmost precision and love.
• The magical realism had me enamoured till the end.
• The head-on discussion of race.
• All the relationships and people that get connected and explained towards the end thrilled me. I loved how something or someone that was mentioned in the first half would reappear towards the end.
• ... I tried to keep it short, but I have to include these next two quotes that have taken over my life:
“I’d recently come across a proverb about not speaking unless you’d thought of something that was better than silence. So I kept typing.”
“No revelation is immediate, not if it’s real. I feel that more and more.”
Ok, now that I've got all the ravings out of my system, onto the negatives: I mainly only have one thing to discuss, which is that ending...
*Spoilers ahead*
This next passage is taken from this article I found that perfectly summed up the events that were written high-key problematically: “In the final pages of the novel, we learn that Boy’s father, Frank Novak, was at one point known as Frances Novak. Frances was a promising graduate student doing advanced research in psychology when she was raped by an acquaintance, at which point she abandoned her work and began to live as a man. Unfortunately, Frances became pregnant as a result of the rape, and it is implied—though not stated outright—that it was in large part this confluence of circumstances that led to Frank’s brutal mistreatment of Boy. When Boy learns the details of her birth, she rounds up Snow and Bird and heads off for New York, determined to “break the spell” holding Frances captive and thus undo the damage she herself has wrought in her dealings with Snow and Bird.
Based on this brief synopsis, one might reach any or all of the following unfortunate conclusions:
1. Transgenderism is the result of trauma.
2. Transgenderism is something that can (and should) be “cured.”
3. Being [transgender] causes you to turn into an abusive sociopath and shove starving rats in your child’s face.”
I don't even have words for that ending. This is the one time a book has left me completely speechless, and not in a good way either. The way Oyeyemi characterized Frankes Novak becoming Frank Novak just felt completely offensive. And I'm utterly disappointed with the author for making Novak's decision seem like a plot twist that appeared in the last ten or so pages. It's such a harmful take on an important and more than often underrepresented topic in literature. Instead, I'd recommend giving Coffee Boy by Austin Chant a read for its positive trans representation by an own voices author.
So I'm not sure what to think of Boy, Snow, Bird. If it weren't for that harmful representation, I would've easily praised this book for its take on race, but yeah... tearing down one group while voicing another doesn't work for me.
*Note: I'm an Amazon Affiliate. If you're interested in buying Coffee Boy, just click on the image below to go through my link. I'll make a small commission!*
Support creators you love. Buy a Coffee for nat (bookspoils) with Ko-fi.com/bookspoils
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.
I feel like saying that Boy, Snow, Bird is a retelling of Snow White is quite confusing as it's barely that. I mean, sure there are some nods to the original tale, however, less than you would anticipate. I ended up liking the book more for its take on beauty, vanity, and race.
Speaking of, I'm going to continue with the positive aspects of this book, and then towards the end discuss something that really made me feel at unease.
The positives:
• The writing knocked me out of the park. Oyeyemi has exactly the kind of writing style I love i.e. specific as hell.
Just to share some of the love:
“She’s tall too, tall in a way that you only really notice at certain moments. The statues of Greek gods were built two and a half times the size of the average human being; I read that in a book Miss Fairfax lent me. The book describes the magnification as being small enough for the figure to remain familiar, but large enough to make you feel mighty strange standing near it. You sense some imminent threat, but common sense tells you there’s no danger, so you don’t run away. You keep a distance that appears to be a respectful one, and you don’t run away, just keep hovering on the point of doing so.”
Also this:
“Hey, Bird—”
“Yeah?”
“Do I look forty?”
“Forty years old?” I asked, trying to buy time.
“Yes, forty years old.”
Her eyes flicked up toward the rearview mirror. I was sitting in the backseat because she doesn’t like to have anyone sitting next to her while she is driving. She says it makes her feel crowded in.”
• Boy, Snow, Bird was a quick read once invested in the storyline ( about half-way through, for me).
• I picked this up when I really needed a distraction from real life – and it did its job perfectly.
• Sisterly-love. I LOVED how the author took the time to really develop the friendship between the two sisters. Sisterhood is such an important topic for me, and I always appreciate an author that tackles it with the utmost precision and love.
• The magical realism had me enamoured till the end.
• The head-on discussion of race.
• All the relationships and people that get connected and explained towards the end thrilled me. I loved how something or someone that was mentioned in the first half would reappear towards the end.
• ... I tried to keep it short, but I have to include these next two quotes that have taken over my life:
“I’d recently come across a proverb about not speaking unless you’d thought of something that was better than silence. So I kept typing.”
“No revelation is immediate, not if it’s real. I feel that more and more.”
Ok, now that I've got all the ravings out of my system, onto the negatives: I mainly only have one thing to discuss, which is that ending...
*Spoilers ahead*
This next passage is taken from this article I found that perfectly summed up the events that were written high-key problematically: “In the final pages of the novel, we learn that Boy’s father, Frank Novak, was at one point known as Frances Novak. Frances was a promising graduate student doing advanced research in psychology when she was raped by an acquaintance, at which point she abandoned her work and began to live as a man. Unfortunately, Frances became pregnant as a result of the rape, and it is implied—though not stated outright—that it was in large part this confluence of circumstances that led to Frank’s brutal mistreatment of Boy. When Boy learns the details of her birth, she rounds up Snow and Bird and heads off for New York, determined to “break the spell” holding Frances captive and thus undo the damage she herself has wrought in her dealings with Snow and Bird.
Based on this brief synopsis, one might reach any or all of the following unfortunate conclusions:
1. Transgenderism is the result of trauma.
2. Transgenderism is something that can (and should) be “cured.”
3. Being [transgender] causes you to turn into an abusive sociopath and shove starving rats in your child’s face.”
I don't even have words for that ending. This is the one time a book has left me completely speechless, and not in a good way either. The way Oyeyemi characterized Frankes Novak becoming Frank Novak just felt completely offensive. And I'm utterly disappointed with the author for making Novak's decision seem like a plot twist that appeared in the last ten or so pages. It's such a harmful take on an important and more than often underrepresented topic in literature. Instead, I'd recommend giving Coffee Boy by Austin Chant a read for its positive trans representation by an own voices author.
So I'm not sure what to think of Boy, Snow, Bird. If it weren't for that harmful representation, I would've easily praised this book for its take on race, but yeah... tearing down one group while voicing another doesn't work for me.
*Note: I'm an Amazon Affiliate. If you're interested in buying Coffee Boy, just click on the image below to go through my link. I'll make a small commission!*
Support creators you love. Buy a Coffee for nat (bookspoils) with Ko-fi.com/bookspoils
January 23, 2014
Boy was the daughter of the Rat Catcher. Tired of the Rat Catcher's abuse she runs away from New York City to a small town in Massachusetts.
Thus starts the story of the three female characters: Boy, Snow and Bird; at the center of the this novel.
Oyeyemi once again has weaved together a story that fuses the real world with fairy tales. She embraces both the whimsical qualities and the underlying terror of those stories that begin with “Once upon a time...”
As a reading experience there is something escapist in the book, it takes little to fall into the world she creates. It's not that there is excessive world building but the mixture of the real with just a touch of magical flows easily and picking up the book each time I was kind of amazed at how quickly I would get right back into her rhythms, and be thinking, wow, this is really really good. I'm not using my words well here. Maybe it seems like an unassuming style of writing that gives way quickly to some mesmerizing beauty.
Last night I reviewed The Spinning Heart, another excellent book, but one where the whole exceeded the apparent sum of it's small parts. Here, the small parts exceed the whole. Taken in parts this is wonderful, but when you try to piece everything together there is something missing. Maybe it's the elements of fairy tales being used that made me want to have a more satisfying ending (be it in the traditional version of something like Grimm or the Disney version of the same stories). Like in fellow Granta's Best Young Novelist Evie Wyld's novel, All the Birds, Singing, all of the greatness of the novel come to an unsatisfying (to me) conclusion. But the rest of the book was good enough that it's forgivable if the material feels like it got a little away from her and that it couldn't find a way to wrap everything up as strongly as the novel had been up until that point.
Boy, Snow, Bird is yet another impressive book coming out this year. 2014 really has some great books coming out, and shows that contemporary literature still has a lot of life to it.
Thus starts the story of the three female characters: Boy, Snow and Bird; at the center of the this novel.
Oyeyemi once again has weaved together a story that fuses the real world with fairy tales. She embraces both the whimsical qualities and the underlying terror of those stories that begin with “Once upon a time...”
As a reading experience there is something escapist in the book, it takes little to fall into the world she creates. It's not that there is excessive world building but the mixture of the real with just a touch of magical flows easily and picking up the book each time I was kind of amazed at how quickly I would get right back into her rhythms, and be thinking, wow, this is really really good. I'm not using my words well here. Maybe it seems like an unassuming style of writing that gives way quickly to some mesmerizing beauty.
Last night I reviewed The Spinning Heart, another excellent book, but one where the whole exceeded the apparent sum of it's small parts. Here, the small parts exceed the whole. Taken in parts this is wonderful, but when you try to piece everything together there is something missing. Maybe it's the elements of fairy tales being used that made me want to have a more satisfying ending (be it in the traditional version of something like Grimm or the Disney version of the same stories). Like in fellow Granta's Best Young Novelist Evie Wyld's novel, All the Birds, Singing, all of the greatness of the novel come to an unsatisfying (to me) conclusion. But the rest of the book was good enough that it's forgivable if the material feels like it got a little away from her and that it couldn't find a way to wrap everything up as strongly as the novel had been up until that point.
Boy, Snow, Bird is yet another impressive book coming out this year. 2014 really has some great books coming out, and shows that contemporary literature still has a lot of life to it.
February 3, 2020
3.5 stars rounded up to 4 stars. i wanted to give this one 5 stars for the nod to Snow White, style, subject matter, and the queer speculative fiction writing. the first half of the book is so strong; i was equal parts riveted and repulsed. the writing is a bit confusing and strange but it served the fairy tale-ish aspect of the story. i love that i have been musing about this for the last few days.
January 25, 2015
Helen Oyeyemi just writes fucking beautifully, and never has this been more apparent than in Boy, Snow, Bird. A loose reworking of the Snow White fairytale, it is told in three parts, as the title infers. Boy Novak is the narrator of the first and third parts; her daughter, Bird, narrates the middle section. Boy's stepdaughter, Snow, has no voice of her own other than a handful of letters exchanged with Bird, but then again she is not quite as central to the story as you might imagine.
Boy, a girl with a latent obsession with mirrors and given to gazing at her own reflection, runs away from her abusive father and lands in Flax Hill, a microcosm of small-town America circa the 50s. Though her heart lies elsewhere, she marries Arturo Whitman - partly because of her desire to become a mother (of sorts) to Snow, a remarkably beautiful child adored by everyone she meets. It's with the birth of Boy and Arturo's own daughter, Bird, that the story sharply changes direction: Bird's dark skin reveals that the Whitmans are a black family passing for white. Encouraged by Arturo's mother to send Bird away, Boy does the opposite and banishes Snow, fulfilling her destiny as a 'wicked stepmother'. But after this, the fairytale basis of the plot falls away, and the tale of Boy, Snow and Bird takes on its own character, becoming a story about race, sisterhood and secrets of many different kinds.
Criticism of Boy, Snow, Bird largely seems to be focused on the fact that it wanders too far from the traditional boundaries of the Snow White story, and can't really be called a retelling or reinterpretation. That's true, I suppose, but I don't think it has to be a bad thing; and already having some familiarity with the author's work meant I wasn't expecting a faithful update of the existing tale anyway (this is, in fact, by far the most conventional book I have read by Oyeyemi). Her 'retelling', then, isn't so much that as a jumping-off point for a story that shape-shifts and reinvents its purpose as it goes along. Snow White is far from being the only fairytale or myth referenced here, and the narratives are continually concerned with duplicities, double identities (there's scarcely a character name that doesn't mean more than one thing), the unreliability of reflections (the expected hints of magic crop up when both Snow and Bird find their reflections do not always behave as they should, but there are also other, less literal, riffs on this theme).
Boy's opening narrative positively zips and fizzes along, full of irresistible energy. The pages skipped by without me even noticing, and if the book has a significant flaw, it's that nothing else in it recaptures the sheer magic of this first third. I mentioned above that Boy, Snow, Bird is the most conventional Oyeyemi book I've yet read, but it's also the most cohesive and whole, working beautifully both as a self-contained story and as a mish-mash of references and meanings. My advice is to try and keep Snow White out of your head as you read this - it's much more rewarding that way.
Boy, a girl with a latent obsession with mirrors and given to gazing at her own reflection, runs away from her abusive father and lands in Flax Hill, a microcosm of small-town America circa the 50s. Though her heart lies elsewhere, she marries Arturo Whitman - partly because of her desire to become a mother (of sorts) to Snow, a remarkably beautiful child adored by everyone she meets. It's with the birth of Boy and Arturo's own daughter, Bird, that the story sharply changes direction: Bird's dark skin reveals that the Whitmans are a black family passing for white. Encouraged by Arturo's mother to send Bird away, Boy does the opposite and banishes Snow, fulfilling her destiny as a 'wicked stepmother'. But after this, the fairytale basis of the plot falls away, and the tale of Boy, Snow and Bird takes on its own character, becoming a story about race, sisterhood and secrets of many different kinds.
Criticism of Boy, Snow, Bird largely seems to be focused on the fact that it wanders too far from the traditional boundaries of the Snow White story, and can't really be called a retelling or reinterpretation. That's true, I suppose, but I don't think it has to be a bad thing; and already having some familiarity with the author's work meant I wasn't expecting a faithful update of the existing tale anyway (this is, in fact, by far the most conventional book I have read by Oyeyemi). Her 'retelling', then, isn't so much that as a jumping-off point for a story that shape-shifts and reinvents its purpose as it goes along. Snow White is far from being the only fairytale or myth referenced here, and the narratives are continually concerned with duplicities, double identities (there's scarcely a character name that doesn't mean more than one thing), the unreliability of reflections (the expected hints of magic crop up when both Snow and Bird find their reflections do not always behave as they should, but there are also other, less literal, riffs on this theme).
Boy's opening narrative positively zips and fizzes along, full of irresistible energy. The pages skipped by without me even noticing, and if the book has a significant flaw, it's that nothing else in it recaptures the sheer magic of this first third. I mentioned above that Boy, Snow, Bird is the most conventional Oyeyemi book I've yet read, but it's also the most cohesive and whole, working beautifully both as a self-contained story and as a mish-mash of references and meanings. My advice is to try and keep Snow White out of your head as you read this - it's much more rewarding that way.
January 31, 2014
“Nobody ever warned me about mirrors so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy.” So begins the dazzingly imaginative and enigmatically-named new novel from Helen Oyeyemi.
But what happens when mirrors are not trustworthy? When Boy is really a girl? When a beautiful pale-skinned youngster actually shares the bloodline of the blackest of black individuals? When beauty is not truth and when truth is not beauty? When a mother or a grandmother is not a safe haven but something else entirely?
Helen Oyeyemi explores questions like these in her own imitable way, mixing a dose of fantasy with a dollop of reality. Her writing gifts, carefully honed in her startlingly good prior novel, Mr. Fox, are on display again here as she merges the real with the fantastical to create a canvas all her own.
The book’s curious title is a compilation of the names of three unique women: Boy, who escapes from her abusive rat-catcher father to settle in a New England town called Flax Hill; her strikingly attractive and widely treasured stepdaughter Snow; and the daughter she conceives with Snow’s father Arturo, named Bird. As the publicist’s blurb on this book reveals, Bird is “colored” since Arturo and his family have long passed for white.
The observant reader can pick up the threads of the Snow White fairy tale: the “evil” stepmother (who is perhaps more protective than evil), the removal of Snow White from the scene and particularly the “Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who’s The Fairest of Them All” query.
Who, indeed, is the fairest? Helen Oyeyemi writes, “”It’s not whiteness that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things—fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too…” Or, to put another way, nothing – not race, gender, or beauty – is valuable onto itself; it is we who place the value on these attributes.
Ms. Oyeyemi sometimes overplays her hand. The narrative (told by Boy in the first and third sections and by her daughter Bird in the second section) loses a bit of steam when Bird takes over. The metaphors on race become too concrete as the author tackles the unfortunate devaluing of persons based on shade of pigment; the writing is far more effective when the reader draws his/her necessary conclusions on the tyranny of the mirror rather than being lead there.
Still, Boy, Snow, Bird is so freshly-conceived – with writing that often leverages our mythic beliefs in fairy tales and soars into our subconscious – that it still manages to beguile. Ms. Oyeyemi is comfortable shattering many of our perceptions about race, gender, appearance, and family and does a masterful job of forcing us to confront our own mirror and ask, “Is the person reflected in the mirror a true representation about who I really am?” 4.5 stars.
But what happens when mirrors are not trustworthy? When Boy is really a girl? When a beautiful pale-skinned youngster actually shares the bloodline of the blackest of black individuals? When beauty is not truth and when truth is not beauty? When a mother or a grandmother is not a safe haven but something else entirely?
Helen Oyeyemi explores questions like these in her own imitable way, mixing a dose of fantasy with a dollop of reality. Her writing gifts, carefully honed in her startlingly good prior novel, Mr. Fox, are on display again here as she merges the real with the fantastical to create a canvas all her own.
The book’s curious title is a compilation of the names of three unique women: Boy, who escapes from her abusive rat-catcher father to settle in a New England town called Flax Hill; her strikingly attractive and widely treasured stepdaughter Snow; and the daughter she conceives with Snow’s father Arturo, named Bird. As the publicist’s blurb on this book reveals, Bird is “colored” since Arturo and his family have long passed for white.
The observant reader can pick up the threads of the Snow White fairy tale: the “evil” stepmother (who is perhaps more protective than evil), the removal of Snow White from the scene and particularly the “Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who’s The Fairest of Them All” query.
Who, indeed, is the fairest? Helen Oyeyemi writes, “”It’s not whiteness that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things—fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too…” Or, to put another way, nothing – not race, gender, or beauty – is valuable onto itself; it is we who place the value on these attributes.
Ms. Oyeyemi sometimes overplays her hand. The narrative (told by Boy in the first and third sections and by her daughter Bird in the second section) loses a bit of steam when Bird takes over. The metaphors on race become too concrete as the author tackles the unfortunate devaluing of persons based on shade of pigment; the writing is far more effective when the reader draws his/her necessary conclusions on the tyranny of the mirror rather than being lead there.
Still, Boy, Snow, Bird is so freshly-conceived – with writing that often leverages our mythic beliefs in fairy tales and soars into our subconscious – that it still manages to beguile. Ms. Oyeyemi is comfortable shattering many of our perceptions about race, gender, appearance, and family and does a masterful job of forcing us to confront our own mirror and ask, “Is the person reflected in the mirror a true representation about who I really am?” 4.5 stars.
January 20, 2018
Boy, Snow, Bird is beautiful, haunting, modern and loose re-telling of the fairy tale of Snow White. The ending made me so mad that I almost chucked the e-reader across the room.
The story is about Boy Novak moving to a new place and starting her life over again. She meets a man named Arturo who has a beautiful daughter named Snow.
Their relationship changes when she gives birth to a child named Bird.
I loved the characters and the huge twists in this book so much. I was reminded of the twist in Life of Pi. Oyeyemi was able to flip the narrative over and make it something else by unveiling a rather large surprise towards the end.
Still though, that ending. I can’t make up my mind whether it was awesome or infuriating.
At any rate, this is a book that captured my attention and held it mercilessly until it was done.
Oyeyemi can write. Check out this passage: “The town should really have been called Flax Hills, since it was huddled up between two of them, but maybe that was the locals’ way of instructing one of the hills to scram. The hills are ringed round with old, dark, thick-trunked trees. They’re so tall you feel a false stillness standing under them; when you look all the way up, you see the wind crashing through the topmost branches, but you hear all the commotion only distantly, if at all…” pg 26.
Here’s a quotation about the balance of power between men and women: “I watched wealthy men and their wives and dates dancing and playing cards and making deals: I will admire you exactly as much, no more or less, as you admire me. I will love you in the strictest moderation. Some couples seemed pleased with their negotiations and others were in despair.” pg 31
The beginning of a love story in three lines: “Because he says he can’t stand you and you act like you can’t stand him, and whenever a man and woman behave like that toward each other, it usually means something’s going on. There’s a precious metal kind of gleam about you, and the man’s a jeweler, you know. So look out.” pg 33
I really liked Oyeyemi’s character development. In this passage, she takes a stab at describing the small things that we look for in each other: “…he knew how to lean in and light a girl’s cigarette with a look and a smile that had me stubbing my cigarette out whenever his attention was elsewhere, just so he’d light up another one for me. It could have been the way he guarded the flame with his palm, the unexpected care with which he carried it up toward your lips; who knows what makes a man’s gesture attractive?” pg 56-57
Finally, I enjoyed Oyeyemi’s interpretation of the magic that exists in every day life: “…a whole lot of technically impossible things are always trying to happen to us, appear to us, talk to us, show us pictures, or just say hi, and you can’t pay attention to all of it, so I just pick the nearest technically impossible thing and I let it happen. Let me know how it goes if you try it.” pg 177
I’m off to try the “nearest technically impossible thing.” Thanks for reading!
The story is about Boy Novak moving to a new place and starting her life over again. She meets a man named Arturo who has a beautiful daughter named Snow.
Their relationship changes when she gives birth to a child named Bird.
I loved the characters and the huge twists in this book so much. I was reminded of the twist in Life of Pi. Oyeyemi was able to flip the narrative over and make it something else by unveiling a rather large surprise towards the end.
Still though, that ending. I can’t make up my mind whether it was awesome or infuriating.
At any rate, this is a book that captured my attention and held it mercilessly until it was done.
Oyeyemi can write. Check out this passage: “The town should really have been called Flax Hills, since it was huddled up between two of them, but maybe that was the locals’ way of instructing one of the hills to scram. The hills are ringed round with old, dark, thick-trunked trees. They’re so tall you feel a false stillness standing under them; when you look all the way up, you see the wind crashing through the topmost branches, but you hear all the commotion only distantly, if at all…” pg 26.
Here’s a quotation about the balance of power between men and women: “I watched wealthy men and their wives and dates dancing and playing cards and making deals: I will admire you exactly as much, no more or less, as you admire me. I will love you in the strictest moderation. Some couples seemed pleased with their negotiations and others were in despair.” pg 31
The beginning of a love story in three lines: “Because he says he can’t stand you and you act like you can’t stand him, and whenever a man and woman behave like that toward each other, it usually means something’s going on. There’s a precious metal kind of gleam about you, and the man’s a jeweler, you know. So look out.” pg 33
I really liked Oyeyemi’s character development. In this passage, she takes a stab at describing the small things that we look for in each other: “…he knew how to lean in and light a girl’s cigarette with a look and a smile that had me stubbing my cigarette out whenever his attention was elsewhere, just so he’d light up another one for me. It could have been the way he guarded the flame with his palm, the unexpected care with which he carried it up toward your lips; who knows what makes a man’s gesture attractive?” pg 56-57
Finally, I enjoyed Oyeyemi’s interpretation of the magic that exists in every day life: “…a whole lot of technically impossible things are always trying to happen to us, appear to us, talk to us, show us pictures, or just say hi, and you can’t pay attention to all of it, so I just pick the nearest technically impossible thing and I let it happen. Let me know how it goes if you try it.” pg 177
I’m off to try the “nearest technically impossible thing.” Thanks for reading!
December 10, 2015
Bamboozled
Tricked
Duped
Hoodwinked
Fooled
Suckered
Misguided
Misled
(Add your own word that would apply here _________)
Almost every review I read prior to reading this book mentioned the Snow White fairy tale angle as the basis for this story. I would never have known this if it wasn't told to me and hearing from some others who've read the book it appears I'm not alone.
The author certainly writes well enough but the storytelling just left much to be desired. This tale begins in 1953 Manhattan and eventually we enter the fictional town of Flax Hill, MA. The familiar themes and tools such as the mirror and beauty are there but in this tale colorism and passing is added for good measure. I thought this concept was very unique but the story was rather dry and it left me reading large sections of the book with the intent to just finish it and move on to something more interesting. Just be done with it!
I'm just left scratching my head at all the many positive reviews for this book. I need to ask them if there's another book with the same title Boy, Snow, Bird and I just picked up the wrong one.
Tricked
Duped
Hoodwinked
Fooled
Suckered
Misguided
Misled
(Add your own word that would apply here _________)
Almost every review I read prior to reading this book mentioned the Snow White fairy tale angle as the basis for this story. I would never have known this if it wasn't told to me and hearing from some others who've read the book it appears I'm not alone.
The author certainly writes well enough but the storytelling just left much to be desired. This tale begins in 1953 Manhattan and eventually we enter the fictional town of Flax Hill, MA. The familiar themes and tools such as the mirror and beauty are there but in this tale colorism and passing is added for good measure. I thought this concept was very unique but the story was rather dry and it left me reading large sections of the book with the intent to just finish it and move on to something more interesting. Just be done with it!
I'm just left scratching my head at all the many positive reviews for this book. I need to ask them if there's another book with the same title Boy, Snow, Bird and I just picked up the wrong one.
January 8, 2020
Woooow. Ok. That was shocking.
It wasn't an offensively bad book in terms of writing. It was reasonable - the characters were rather flat and there were far too many to feel invested in any of them. In fact, they were all just fleeting figures who sped through life with little to no fairy-tale allegorical purpose as promised by the marketing of the book.
There was nothing magical about it, and just when I thought the book was going to discuss race relations in 1950's America, it stopped in its tracks. It didn't explore anything significant, the characters were somewhat bland and malleable - the author discarded characters through overly-convenient and nonsensical ways just to appease the ease of her "plot" (it's far too grand a term for the structure of this book, but for lack of another word, I'll employ it.)
THEN, the ending. Wow. How atrociously ignorant and offensive to members of a particular community.
***SPOILERS AHEAD. Also, trigger warnings of rape****
So, the story ends, extremely abruptly, with our protagonist. Boy, discovering his rat-catcher father is a trans man.
She then proceeds to INSIST on referring to her father as a 'she', enforcing others around her to do the same by telling them to "stop calling her, 'he'" which was just a grossly ignorant violation of transgender rights.
To make things worse, the 'reason behind' her father's transition is due to trauma from sexual assault. After being raped by a man, he decided he wanted to transition into a man to protect himself from further violation. Yes, because all gender transitions are instigated by trauma and mental illness. This just screamed to me Boomer 90's ideology in which women in the 90s kept making remarks such as "I don't blame women for becoming lesbians, men are trash' You know because people PICK their sexual orientation and gender-based on their external circumstances. The whole endeavour of this book in the final 20 pages reeks of ignorance and outdated understandings of transgenderism.
In fact, they refer to her father's transition as a marker of being MENTALLY ILL and insist on referring to her father by his former female name. In fact, the reason why her father was so abusive to her was that he was battling with all the trauma of both his past AND HIS TRANSITION.
Boy, horrified by this new revelation, decides to see if 'any of her mother is still left (i.e. any female part of her father is still left)' and travels back home in order to confront her father with the subliminal message being she does so with the intent of de-transitioning her father.
WOW. WOW. I'm NOT part of the trans community, but a member of my family is and always has been since before I was born. My family, who are boomers, would never DREAM of insisting on calling them their pre-transition pronouns or encouraging them de-transition for their own personal preference.
The ending of this book was so GROSSLY disturbing and ignorant I can't give the writer any credibility for even the slightest amount of decent writing they had in this book. Their writing wasn't anything special, but it wasn't horrendous. However, this plot weaving and ending was.
It wasn't an offensively bad book in terms of writing. It was reasonable - the characters were rather flat and there were far too many to feel invested in any of them. In fact, they were all just fleeting figures who sped through life with little to no fairy-tale allegorical purpose as promised by the marketing of the book.
There was nothing magical about it, and just when I thought the book was going to discuss race relations in 1950's America, it stopped in its tracks. It didn't explore anything significant, the characters were somewhat bland and malleable - the author discarded characters through overly-convenient and nonsensical ways just to appease the ease of her "plot" (it's far too grand a term for the structure of this book, but for lack of another word, I'll employ it.)
THEN, the ending. Wow. How atrociously ignorant and offensive to members of a particular community.
***SPOILERS AHEAD. Also, trigger warnings of rape****
So, the story ends, extremely abruptly, with our protagonist. Boy, discovering his rat-catcher father is a trans man.
She then proceeds to INSIST on referring to her father as a 'she', enforcing others around her to do the same by telling them to "stop calling her, 'he'" which was just a grossly ignorant violation of transgender rights.
To make things worse, the 'reason behind' her father's transition is due to trauma from sexual assault. After being raped by a man, he decided he wanted to transition into a man to protect himself from further violation. Yes, because all gender transitions are instigated by trauma and mental illness. This just screamed to me Boomer 90's ideology in which women in the 90s kept making remarks such as "I don't blame women for becoming lesbians, men are trash' You know because people PICK their sexual orientation and gender-based on their external circumstances. The whole endeavour of this book in the final 20 pages reeks of ignorance and outdated understandings of transgenderism.
In fact, they refer to her father's transition as a marker of being MENTALLY ILL and insist on referring to her father by his former female name. In fact, the reason why her father was so abusive to her was that he was battling with all the trauma of both his past AND HIS TRANSITION.
Boy, horrified by this new revelation, decides to see if 'any of her mother is still left (i.e. any female part of her father is still left)' and travels back home in order to confront her father with the subliminal message being she does so with the intent of de-transitioning her father.
WOW. WOW. I'm NOT part of the trans community, but a member of my family is and always has been since before I was born. My family, who are boomers, would never DREAM of insisting on calling them their pre-transition pronouns or encouraging them de-transition for their own personal preference.
The ending of this book was so GROSSLY disturbing and ignorant I can't give the writer any credibility for even the slightest amount of decent writing they had in this book. Their writing wasn't anything special, but it wasn't horrendous. However, this plot weaving and ending was.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 1, 2014
Wtf was that?
August 2, 2014
Why the three (3) rating? It’s not the book, it’s me.
Boy (a girl) runs away from home and her abusive father (a rat catcher). She eventually meets and marries Snow’s father. Boy gives birth to Bird. Boy becomes a wicked step-mother and sends Snow away to live with relatives.
Boy, Snow, and Bird all seem to not see their reflection in mirrors. A lot of twists and turns in the story with an unexpected ending.
I really thought the book was great. I am planning to read it again, soon. I like fairy tales and this was a good one.
Boy (a girl) runs away from home and her abusive father (a rat catcher). She eventually meets and marries Snow’s father. Boy gives birth to Bird. Boy becomes a wicked step-mother and sends Snow away to live with relatives.
Boy, Snow, and Bird all seem to not see their reflection in mirrors. A lot of twists and turns in the story with an unexpected ending.
I really thought the book was great. I am planning to read it again, soon. I like fairy tales and this was a good one.
January 24, 2015
Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird is a victim of misleading marketing. I knew little about the author and nothing about her work, and approached this novel with curiosity - I've read that it was a reimagining of Snow White, st in contemporary times; this, together with the book's intriguing title, was enough to make me want to read it.
Those expecting Boy, Snow, Bird to be a contemporary fairy tale, brimming with fantasy, are bound to be disappointed - there is little if any fantasy here, and references to Snow White mostly amount to tropes and references to symbolism from the classic fable. This isn't necessarily Oyeyemi's fault - perhaps she never intended her book to be branded as a retelling of Snow White; after all, authors often have little influence on marketing of their work.
Boy, Snow, Bird begins with the introduction of th first character and narrator - Boy Novak, a young woman who flees from her abusive father, and leaves New York City for a small town of Flax Hill in Massachusetts. In Flax Hill Boy meets Arturo, a recent widower and father of a young girl, Snow; although she is not sure if she loves, him, the two get married and Boy becomes Snow's stepmother. Boy and Arturo eventually have another daughter, Bird - whose birth brings up a twist and reveals all sorts of past secrets on both sides.
Oyeyemi does bring up references to Snow White - Snow's name, Boy's concern about becoming a stepmother, the theme of mirrors and reflection throughout the book - but the real focus of Boy, Snow, Bird are racial relations in 1950's America, presented via the example of a typical small town. This is not a new theme, and the twist on it displayed here is not particularly compelling - for several reasons. Despite having several characters who are clearly meant to be important, I found none of them to be truly distinctive: Bot is meant to be sympathized with because of her painful upbringing, but I found her voice to be unlikable and couldn't care for her. Her relationship with Arturo is basically glossed over; there's little feeling of romance, passion, or anything that would provoke an emotional response and attachment. A large part of the story is narrated in an epistolary manner - I couldn't help but see as a convenient way for the author to tell the reader a significant amount of plot and information, rather than letting her characters act it out themselves. Oyeyemi introduces another twist near the end, but it does not help the book, as the plot lacks a cohesive element which would help it hang together - and if we can't care about the characters, what they do and what happens to them, the importance of the message gets muddled and lost along the way.
This isn't a terrible book, but there are certainly better ones - and that might include Helen Oyeyemi's other novels. Those who enjoy fantasy and fairy tales will not miss anything by skipping Boy, Snow, Bird - and those looking for compelling, important novels about racial relations in America during the 1950's, which border on magical realism can take the time to read Ralph Ellison's great classic, Invisible Man.
Those expecting Boy, Snow, Bird to be a contemporary fairy tale, brimming with fantasy, are bound to be disappointed - there is little if any fantasy here, and references to Snow White mostly amount to tropes and references to symbolism from the classic fable. This isn't necessarily Oyeyemi's fault - perhaps she never intended her book to be branded as a retelling of Snow White; after all, authors often have little influence on marketing of their work.
Boy, Snow, Bird begins with the introduction of th first character and narrator - Boy Novak, a young woman who flees from her abusive father, and leaves New York City for a small town of Flax Hill in Massachusetts. In Flax Hill Boy meets Arturo, a recent widower and father of a young girl, Snow; although she is not sure if she loves, him, the two get married and Boy becomes Snow's stepmother. Boy and Arturo eventually have another daughter, Bird - whose birth brings up a twist and reveals all sorts of past secrets on both sides.
Oyeyemi does bring up references to Snow White - Snow's name, Boy's concern about becoming a stepmother, the theme of mirrors and reflection throughout the book - but the real focus of Boy, Snow, Bird are racial relations in 1950's America, presented via the example of a typical small town. This is not a new theme, and the twist on it displayed here is not particularly compelling - for several reasons. Despite having several characters who are clearly meant to be important, I found none of them to be truly distinctive: Bot is meant to be sympathized with because of her painful upbringing, but I found her voice to be unlikable and couldn't care for her. Her relationship with Arturo is basically glossed over; there's little feeling of romance, passion, or anything that would provoke an emotional response and attachment. A large part of the story is narrated in an epistolary manner - I couldn't help but see as a convenient way for the author to tell the reader a significant amount of plot and information, rather than letting her characters act it out themselves. Oyeyemi introduces another twist near the end, but it does not help the book, as the plot lacks a cohesive element which would help it hang together - and if we can't care about the characters, what they do and what happens to them, the importance of the message gets muddled and lost along the way.
This isn't a terrible book, but there are certainly better ones - and that might include Helen Oyeyemi's other novels. Those who enjoy fantasy and fairy tales will not miss anything by skipping Boy, Snow, Bird - and those looking for compelling, important novels about racial relations in America during the 1950's, which border on magical realism can take the time to read Ralph Ellison's great classic, Invisible Man.
January 4, 2016
Such an interesting premise, and such a great book..in parts. As a whole, it was a fail in my opinion. The novel is divided into three parts: the first is narrated by our protagonist, Boy; the second by Boy's daughter, Bird; and the third by Boy again. It was lucky it was divided up in such a way, else I probably would have stopped reading halfway through. It starts off well, Boy has an intriguing history (abusive father, absent mother) that sets her up as very sympathetic, yet despite the fact that we spend more than half of the book inside her mind, her motives and actions are never fully clear.
Bird's narrative is where it starts to pick up again, as we read of all of the difficulties she faces coming from an inter-racial family in the mid-1960s - particularly in a family of African Americans who had been passing for white up until her birth. This is also where we learn more about Snow (though only through letters and brief encounters), who has become a bit of an enigma.
Then comes the third part, with Boy narrating once again. This is where the novel really takes a turn for the worse. The ultimate turning point, however, is in the last twenty pages, when Boy learns something earth-shattering about her past. I think ending with this revelation was entirely ridiculous - not so much in the sense that it's impossible or unbelievable (though, it IS a big stretch), but that it comes completely out of nowhere. This is an award-winning author, I know she's heard of foreshadowing before. And what about giving Snow a narrative voice as well? That would have been a much better use of the last third of the book.
Disclaimer: I read this in galley-form, so perhaps there is some hope (and major editing) for it yet, though I doubt it.
Bird's narrative is where it starts to pick up again, as we read of all of the difficulties she faces coming from an inter-racial family in the mid-1960s - particularly in a family of African Americans who had been passing for white up until her birth. This is also where we learn more about Snow (though only through letters and brief encounters), who has become a bit of an enigma.
Then comes the third part, with Boy narrating once again. This is where the novel really takes a turn for the worse. The ultimate turning point, however, is in the last twenty pages, when Boy learns something earth-shattering about her past. I think ending with this revelation was entirely ridiculous - not so much in the sense that it's impossible or unbelievable (though, it IS a big stretch), but that it comes completely out of nowhere. This is an award-winning author, I know she's heard of foreshadowing before. And what about giving Snow a narrative voice as well? That would have been a much better use of the last third of the book.
Disclaimer: I read this in galley-form, so perhaps there is some hope (and major editing) for it yet, though I doubt it.
May 10, 2021
Wow, what an unique story. In Boy, Snow, Bird Helen Oyeyemi uses a well known fairytale to tell a smart, suggestive story about family secrets, (internalized) racism, and identity. Its ending though, is a problem.
We start the book with meeting Boy Novak, a young woman running away from her life with horrible abusive father Frank, a famous rat-catcher in New York. Taking the midnight bus to a small town in New England, Flax Hill, Boy tries to settle in, and ends up meeting Arturo Whitman. Arturo is a master jeweller, widower, and father of six-year-old Snow, who is the apple of the Whitman’s family eye for many reasons. After marrying Arturo and giving birth to a healthy baby, many of those reasons are revealed, for Bird is a dark-skinned girl.
In 1950’s racist America, the light-skinned black Whitmans have tried their hardest to pass as a white family, casting out dark coloured daughter Clara, and advising Boy to do the same with Bird. Boy, who has been slowly transforming from a beaten, neglected Cinderella into a harder, darker figure more alike Snow White’s wicked stepmother, however decides to send Snow away to live in with Clara.
The book is cut into three parts: in the first and the third Boy is the narrator, and in the second Bird and Snow tell their story through a series of letters. It’s hard to feel emotionally connected to any of the characters, especially Boy: she’s an icy woman, beautiful but closed-off due to her father’s long abuse.
I didn’t mind this: for me a character doesn’t have to be good person in order to be a good character. I liked Boy’s biting behaviour and understood why she disliked Snow so much, how unfair her reasons may be.
Bird’s character was less defined as her mother, but she had spunk. Despite her mother who tries to keep the girls apart, Bird starts writing her older sister letters. Through those we find out that the pure-hearted Snow has grown into a kind but sharp woman, who still experiences judgement from her peers despite having the ‘right’ looks.
So in this book, the main conflict isn’t really caused by the family relationship between Boy, Snow, and Bird, but by society’s views on beauty and racism. The general idea is that a woman is incapable of loving another woman if she thinks that woman is prettier than herself, but does this idea also counts if that other woman is your sister? Or your (step-)daughter? How right is it that these three women fight to be “the fairest of them all” is that struggle only makes them deeply unhappy?
The inter-racist opinions of the family Whitman I found the most damaging. Because the family views Bird as lesser than Snow, they give Boy the message that she should hate her own daughter as well. Still, this book takes place in 1950’s of America: a time where 14-year-old boys like Emmet Till get brutally beaten to death for whistling at a white woman (and oh fury, that woman recently admitted that she lied about this event: read it here).
The Whitmans, like so many black and coloured people, were scared and sick of the racism and the prejudice, and so they sought their way out by carefully marrying lighter-skin folks so that one day a child would be born that could grant the family compliments and fair treatment.
This explanation doesn’t excuse the vile way the Whitmans treat Bird and how they casted out Clara, but it is a sign of how life-long racist views can affect how people look out their own race. If everyone hates your skin-color, why should you love it?
So once again, Helen Oyeyemi has written a wonderful book with critical questions and interesting characters; however, the author does something very awful at the end of this novel. This ending involves a plot twist about a transgender character, and the topic is handled so poorly that many readers gave this book low ratings and warnings not to read it.
I certainly agree that the topic isn’t handled well – unfortunately, in White is for Witching Oyeyemi doesn’t treat the eating disorder Pica right either – but I won’t judge a book solemnly on it's poor finale. This decision might make people angry, and that’s fine, but I think you have to see the plot twist as something in line with the novel’s running topic of “identity”. Only seen from that viewpoint the twist makes sense, but for the rest I found the ending of the novel very abrupt and poorly executed.
But despite the ending, I had a great time reading Boy, Snow, Bird. With her enchanting and cryptic writing style the author turns the readers’ expectations on their head by giving the ‘evil stepmother’ a voice, by making Snow Whitman a real person, and by making racism and ideals of beauty the real bad guys. I won’t forget this book anytime soon.
This is the first book that I read for the #DiverseAThon, which ran from the 22nd to the 29th of January 2017.
We start the book with meeting Boy Novak, a young woman running away from her life with horrible abusive father Frank, a famous rat-catcher in New York. Taking the midnight bus to a small town in New England, Flax Hill, Boy tries to settle in, and ends up meeting Arturo Whitman. Arturo is a master jeweller, widower, and father of six-year-old Snow, who is the apple of the Whitman’s family eye for many reasons. After marrying Arturo and giving birth to a healthy baby, many of those reasons are revealed, for Bird is a dark-skinned girl.
In 1950’s racist America, the light-skinned black Whitmans have tried their hardest to pass as a white family, casting out dark coloured daughter Clara, and advising Boy to do the same with Bird. Boy, who has been slowly transforming from a beaten, neglected Cinderella into a harder, darker figure more alike Snow White’s wicked stepmother, however decides to send Snow away to live in with Clara.
The book is cut into three parts: in the first and the third Boy is the narrator, and in the second Bird and Snow tell their story through a series of letters. It’s hard to feel emotionally connected to any of the characters, especially Boy: she’s an icy woman, beautiful but closed-off due to her father’s long abuse.
I didn’t mind this: for me a character doesn’t have to be good person in order to be a good character. I liked Boy’s biting behaviour and understood why she disliked Snow so much, how unfair her reasons may be.
Bird’s character was less defined as her mother, but she had spunk. Despite her mother who tries to keep the girls apart, Bird starts writing her older sister letters. Through those we find out that the pure-hearted Snow has grown into a kind but sharp woman, who still experiences judgement from her peers despite having the ‘right’ looks.
So in this book, the main conflict isn’t really caused by the family relationship between Boy, Snow, and Bird, but by society’s views on beauty and racism. The general idea is that a woman is incapable of loving another woman if she thinks that woman is prettier than herself, but does this idea also counts if that other woman is your sister? Or your (step-)daughter? How right is it that these three women fight to be “the fairest of them all” is that struggle only makes them deeply unhappy?
The inter-racist opinions of the family Whitman I found the most damaging. Because the family views Bird as lesser than Snow, they give Boy the message that she should hate her own daughter as well. Still, this book takes place in 1950’s of America: a time where 14-year-old boys like Emmet Till get brutally beaten to death for whistling at a white woman (and oh fury, that woman recently admitted that she lied about this event: read it here).
The Whitmans, like so many black and coloured people, were scared and sick of the racism and the prejudice, and so they sought their way out by carefully marrying lighter-skin folks so that one day a child would be born that could grant the family compliments and fair treatment.
This explanation doesn’t excuse the vile way the Whitmans treat Bird and how they casted out Clara, but it is a sign of how life-long racist views can affect how people look out their own race. If everyone hates your skin-color, why should you love it?
So once again, Helen Oyeyemi has written a wonderful book with critical questions and interesting characters; however, the author does something very awful at the end of this novel. This ending involves a plot twist about a transgender character, and the topic is handled so poorly that many readers gave this book low ratings and warnings not to read it.
I certainly agree that the topic isn’t handled well – unfortunately, in White is for Witching Oyeyemi doesn’t treat the eating disorder Pica right either – but I won’t judge a book solemnly on it's poor finale. This decision might make people angry, and that’s fine, but I think you have to see the plot twist as something in line with the novel’s running topic of “identity”. Only seen from that viewpoint the twist makes sense, but for the rest I found the ending of the novel very abrupt and poorly executed.
But despite the ending, I had a great time reading Boy, Snow, Bird. With her enchanting and cryptic writing style the author turns the readers’ expectations on their head by giving the ‘evil stepmother’ a voice, by making Snow Whitman a real person, and by making racism and ideals of beauty the real bad guys. I won’t forget this book anytime soon.
This is the first book that I read for the #DiverseAThon, which ran from the 22nd to the 29th of January 2017.
June 8, 2022
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In the last few weeks I’ve read two works by Oyeyemi (Peaces and What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours) and what I liked most about them was how funny, inventive, and unapologetically queer they were. So, naturally, I was somewhat surprised and saddened to discover that Boy, Snow, Bird lacks any of those qualities. I can’t honestly say that Boy, Snow, Bird has any real strengths. There are far more superior books out there examining race in the 1950s and 1960s America, such as ReginaPorter’s The Travelers, and to call this novel a Snow White retelling seems overarching. While Oyeyemi does incorporate within her narrative certain recognizable fairy tale motifs—mean stepmothers who hate their angelic stepdaughters, magical mirrors and or reflections—the story she recounts struck me as painfully prosaic. We have a vague, and unconvincing, historical setting, cardboard characters, and an uneventful storyline that drags on too long.
The novel is divided into three parts. Part one and three are narrated by Boy. She’s white and the daughter of a pest exterminator who she often refers to as ‘the rat catcher’. In a manner reminiscent of Dickens and She Who Shall Not Be Named, Oyeyemi gives her characters names, or nicknames, that convey their personality or profession. I may sound overly critical here but why do characters whose professions are often openly looked down upon—janitors, cleaners, pest exterminators, etc.—are so frequently cast in the role of sinister and/or obsessive creeps? I mean, just because someone whose job requires them to kill rats doesn’t mean they have to be ‘unstable’ and rat-obsessed (this guy makes rat noises and is apt to go off on anti-rat rants). Anyhow, this rat catcher is horrible through-and-through. He treats Boy in a rather appalling way and understandably she decides to run off once she’s done with high school. She ends up finding a job (what that was i cannot recall) and eventually becomes involved with a man named Arturo who is entirely void of a personality. This man has a daughter called Snow who is biracial, and Boy decides to exile her. Why? I can’t say for sure. It seemed that Boy found Snow’s ‘goodness’ grating or felt threatened by her.
Boy and Arturo have a child together, Bird. Part two is narrated by her and it mostly consists of a series of boring episodes. She exchanged letters with Snow, who she has never met. Whether they got on or not, I have no idea. Their responses to each other’s letters were almost jarring. There is an attempt at exploring doubleness but the story never has anything interesting on this matter.
We then return to Boy who has nothing really interesting to say.
Up to this point, it was safe to say that I did not care for this novel. The characters were dull, poorly developed. Our mains were very one-note and their voices failed to elicit any strong emotions in me. The secondary characters are barely there, and most of the male characters—regardless of their age—blurred together. We also have that one Italian character who just has to say 'cara' this and 'cara' that. Ffs. Still, I would not have discouraged others from attempting to read it as this could have easily been one of those ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ cases but then Oyeyemi drops a rather unpleasant surprise near the end.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Turns out that the ‘rat catcher’, turns out his name is Frank, who up to now has been portrayed as this abusive possibly ‘deranged’ villain, is a trans man. Frank is Boy’s mother. Frank used to be a gay woman who was raped and became pregnant with Boy. After this traumatic experience Frank ‘became’ trans: “You know how Frank says he became Frank? He says he looked in the mirror one morning when he was still Frances, and this man she’d never seen before was just standing there, looking back. ”
Leaving aside the fact that Frank’s ‘story’ is recounted by someone who keeps misgendering and deadnaming them (this story is set in the 50s and 60s after all), I find this whole ‘reveal’ to be a poor choice indeed. Not only does the story imply that victims of sexual abuse cannot ever recover (which, unfortunately, sometimes happens to be true but here it struck me as intentionally sensational) but they will inevitably become abusers themselves. Which, yikes. Can we not? And don’t get me started on the whole ‘woman wanting to escape womanhood by becoming a man + lesbians becoming men because of trauma and the patriarchy’ terfy combo. Fuck sake. And to make your one trans character into an unhinged abuser is decidedly questionable.
To prospective readers of this book: I would like to dissuade you. Give this one a wide berth. Oyeyemi has written far better, and certainly a lot less dubious, things, so I recommend you check those out instead.
In the last few weeks I’ve read two works by Oyeyemi (Peaces and What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours) and what I liked most about them was how funny, inventive, and unapologetically queer they were. So, naturally, I was somewhat surprised and saddened to discover that Boy, Snow, Bird lacks any of those qualities. I can’t honestly say that Boy, Snow, Bird has any real strengths. There are far more superior books out there examining race in the 1950s and 1960s America, such as ReginaPorter’s The Travelers, and to call this novel a Snow White retelling seems overarching. While Oyeyemi does incorporate within her narrative certain recognizable fairy tale motifs—mean stepmothers who hate their angelic stepdaughters, magical mirrors and or reflections—the story she recounts struck me as painfully prosaic. We have a vague, and unconvincing, historical setting, cardboard characters, and an uneventful storyline that drags on too long.
The novel is divided into three parts. Part one and three are narrated by Boy. She’s white and the daughter of a pest exterminator who she often refers to as ‘the rat catcher’. In a manner reminiscent of Dickens and She Who Shall Not Be Named, Oyeyemi gives her characters names, or nicknames, that convey their personality or profession. I may sound overly critical here but why do characters whose professions are often openly looked down upon—janitors, cleaners, pest exterminators, etc.—are so frequently cast in the role of sinister and/or obsessive creeps? I mean, just because someone whose job requires them to kill rats doesn’t mean they have to be ‘unstable’ and rat-obsessed (this guy makes rat noises and is apt to go off on anti-rat rants). Anyhow, this rat catcher is horrible through-and-through. He treats Boy in a rather appalling way and understandably she decides to run off once she’s done with high school. She ends up finding a job (what that was i cannot recall) and eventually becomes involved with a man named Arturo who is entirely void of a personality. This man has a daughter called Snow who is biracial, and Boy decides to exile her. Why? I can’t say for sure. It seemed that Boy found Snow’s ‘goodness’ grating or felt threatened by her.
Boy and Arturo have a child together, Bird. Part two is narrated by her and it mostly consists of a series of boring episodes. She exchanged letters with Snow, who she has never met. Whether they got on or not, I have no idea. Their responses to each other’s letters were almost jarring. There is an attempt at exploring doubleness but the story never has anything interesting on this matter.
We then return to Boy who has nothing really interesting to say.
Up to this point, it was safe to say that I did not care for this novel. The characters were dull, poorly developed. Our mains were very one-note and their voices failed to elicit any strong emotions in me. The secondary characters are barely there, and most of the male characters—regardless of their age—blurred together. We also have that one Italian character who just has to say 'cara' this and 'cara' that. Ffs. Still, I would not have discouraged others from attempting to read it as this could have easily been one of those ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ cases but then Oyeyemi drops a rather unpleasant surprise near the end.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Turns out that the ‘rat catcher’, turns out his name is Frank, who up to now has been portrayed as this abusive possibly ‘deranged’ villain, is a trans man. Frank is Boy’s mother. Frank used to be a gay woman who was raped and became pregnant with Boy. After this traumatic experience Frank ‘became’ trans: “You know how Frank says he became Frank? He says he looked in the mirror one morning when he was still Frances, and this man she’d never seen before was just standing there, looking back. ”
Leaving aside the fact that Frank’s ‘story’ is recounted by someone who keeps misgendering and deadnaming them (this story is set in the 50s and 60s after all), I find this whole ‘reveal’ to be a poor choice indeed. Not only does the story imply that victims of sexual abuse cannot ever recover (which, unfortunately, sometimes happens to be true but here it struck me as intentionally sensational) but they will inevitably become abusers themselves. Which, yikes. Can we not? And don’t get me started on the whole ‘woman wanting to escape womanhood by becoming a man + lesbians becoming men because of trauma and the patriarchy’ terfy combo. Fuck sake. And to make your one trans character into an unhinged abuser is decidedly questionable.
To prospective readers of this book: I would like to dissuade you. Give this one a wide berth. Oyeyemi has written far better, and certainly a lot less dubious, things, so I recommend you check those out instead.
April 15, 2021
I read this book for class. It had such a promising idea behind it, but the second half of the book really fell flat. This book doesn’t have an ending either. It feels like it ended mid chapter. And there was some lines at the end depicting a trans character that didn’t sit right with me.
February 6, 2015
In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that I received a copy of this book for advanced review. I am always skeptical of my own responses to such books (am I being too “easy” on something because it was given to me? or maybe I’m being too “hard” because I’m worried I might be too easy?); one can end up in a whirlwind of doubt over one’s own reactions. In the case of Boy, Snow, Bird, I found myself repeating to my husband several times yesterday, that I should really give this a 4 star rating. When questioned, I could not really articulate any reason to detract stars other than my own questions about my perceptions. And given that the book is ultimately about perceptions, I should adjust my mirror to reflect realty, rather than being reactionary. And, so, it is a 5 star book.
As a social psychologist, I love the theme that perception is reality. Race, beauty, reflections in mirrors, gender; everything can be what you want it to be, one just needs to present the self accordingly so that the world will be receptive. Oyeyemi writes much more poetic prose than Goffman, but essentially the novel is about presentation of self.
Race is not really biological or genetic in this book, it is the perception of one’s background. There are several moral layers of whether “passing” should be acceptable or not: and of course, the irony is that the most white of all (Snow White, if you will) is sent away to live with the most colored (I wasn’t sure though about interpreting Clara and John and their dark skinned world as being that of the dwarves. That could be quite an offensive and non-PC interpretation).
Snow is sent by the “evil” step-mother Boy, but Boy is presented in such a way that the reader can be empathetic. Boy does not simply send Snow away for Boy’s own good, she is protecting her daughter Bird who may suffer by comparison with Snow. Boy’s distinction is that “it’s not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness.” She is against Olivia and begrudges Snow out of maternal feeling for Bird.
Ultimately, we wonder if Boy is the one who is treating Snow poorly or if it is the world at large. Boy describes her as “not the fairest of them all. And the sooner she and Olivia and all the rest of them understand that, the better.” And, later, Bird is upset because of “the things people were saying, the way they were making Snow sound like some kind of ornament just passing by..not even passing by, but being passed around. Everybody agreed that Snow was valuable, but she was far too valuable to have around for keeps.” Again, we have the concept of perception and its misalignment with reality: “Does she know that she does this to people? Dumb question. This is something we do to her.” Snow is incapable of being seen as bad (other than by Boy), she can do bad things, but they won’t be noticed; she can disagree with people, but they won’t hear her negativity. She is simply the snow-white reflection of perfection on which they depend for their own peace of mind. Her beauty is not automatically to her benefit, it is also a stigma that she must bear through the world.
Following the Snow White fairytale, Oyeyemi incorporates a mirror theme throughout. Boy is obsessed with mirrors, Frances became Frank after looking in the mirror, and both Snow and Bird sometimes do not appear in mirrors. As the evil step-mother, Boy asks her mirror for advice: “Mirrors see so much. They could help us if they wanted to. In those days I spoke to every mirror in the apartment. I questioned them, told them I didn’t know what to do, but none of them answered me.”
There are several other fairytales that are embedded in the story: we have two versions of Belle Capuchine (both of which are relevant: one version in which a white girl is mistaken for a black girl and one in which Belle Capuchine rules over her poisonous garden); Anansi the spider tales; and the story of the magician and the woman who never changes (her own perceptions trump the magic). She is the same woman within which a snake resides and we are left to understand that she is the frigid representation of Boy. Boy’s quest at end to break Frank/Frances’s spell also rests on perception. Whether or not Boy can bring Frances “back” is determined not by reality, but by whether or not Boy can make Frances believe that she is Boy’s mother.
As for the writing itself, Oyeyemi has great turns of phrase. I have a few of my favorite quotes below:
“I’ll take the appraisal of my male peers over that any day. Four out of five of them either ignored me or were disgustingly kind, the way nice boys are to the plainest Jane they know. But that was only four out of five. Number five tended to lose his balance for some reason and follow me around making the most extraordinary pleas and offers.”
“I’ve always been pretty sure I could kill someone if I had to. Myself, or my father—whichever option proved most practical. I wouldn’t kill for hatred’s sake; I’d only do it to solve a problem. And only after other solutions have failed. That kind of bottom line is either in your character or it isn’t, and like I said, it develops early.”
“Time and time again the power of an idea or a piece of art was assessed by either its beauty or its technique or its usefulness, and time and time again my wife was surprised by how rarely anything on earth satisfies all three camps.”
“That’s the ideal meeting…once upon a time, only once, unexpectedly, then never again.”
“School is one long illness with symptoms that switch every five minutes so you think it’s getting better or worse. But really it’s the same thing for years and years.”
Oyeyemi also does a very interesting thing with perspective twice in the novel. In the first chapter of the book, Boy jumps from 1st person to 2nd person in order to describe her home life and then in the first chapter of the 2nd section of the book, Bird also jumps perspective (1st person to 3rd person) for a few pages to describe herself. This was a great way to grab the reader’s attention and to distance the narrator from potentially difficult revelations. I find 2nd person narration always to be slightly alarming (most especially and well done in Grimsley’s Winter Birds), but the change from 1st to 3rd had a similar effect. Overall, it was a very unusual and creative way to highlight these descriptive passages and the difficulty that the character had in revealing herself.
Finally, it seems that I keep coming across this notion of parallel worlds (thank you quantum physics for being omni-present). After all, what is Boy’s thought that her mother could either be alive or dead as long as she doesn’t go looking for the answer than just another version of Schroedinger’s cat problem? There was also the instance in which Boy sees another version of herself bloody through the trees and Kazim’s comic strip moral that “What’s next is what happened before.” I’m not sure that any of this was necessary to the rest of the book’s themes, unless Oyeyemi simply wanted to make a point about perception determinating which one of the parallel worlds in which we reside.
Overall, the book is enchanting. It is compelling, entertaining, at times profound, and deals with some great questions about perception and human interaction. I would recommend it highly.
February 2, 2015 update: Interviewed in blogpost: https://beyondbestsellers.wordpress.com/
As a social psychologist, I love the theme that perception is reality. Race, beauty, reflections in mirrors, gender; everything can be what you want it to be, one just needs to present the self accordingly so that the world will be receptive. Oyeyemi writes much more poetic prose than Goffman, but essentially the novel is about presentation of self.
Race is not really biological or genetic in this book, it is the perception of one’s background. There are several moral layers of whether “passing” should be acceptable or not: and of course, the irony is that the most white of all (Snow White, if you will) is sent away to live with the most colored (I wasn’t sure though about interpreting Clara and John and their dark skinned world as being that of the dwarves. That could be quite an offensive and non-PC interpretation).
Snow is sent by the “evil” step-mother Boy, but Boy is presented in such a way that the reader can be empathetic. Boy does not simply send Snow away for Boy’s own good, she is protecting her daughter Bird who may suffer by comparison with Snow. Boy’s distinction is that “it’s not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness.” She is against Olivia and begrudges Snow out of maternal feeling for Bird.
Ultimately, we wonder if Boy is the one who is treating Snow poorly or if it is the world at large. Boy describes her as “not the fairest of them all. And the sooner she and Olivia and all the rest of them understand that, the better.” And, later, Bird is upset because of “the things people were saying, the way they were making Snow sound like some kind of ornament just passing by..not even passing by, but being passed around. Everybody agreed that Snow was valuable, but she was far too valuable to have around for keeps.” Again, we have the concept of perception and its misalignment with reality: “Does she know that she does this to people? Dumb question. This is something we do to her.” Snow is incapable of being seen as bad (other than by Boy), she can do bad things, but they won’t be noticed; she can disagree with people, but they won’t hear her negativity. She is simply the snow-white reflection of perfection on which they depend for their own peace of mind. Her beauty is not automatically to her benefit, it is also a stigma that she must bear through the world.
Following the Snow White fairytale, Oyeyemi incorporates a mirror theme throughout. Boy is obsessed with mirrors, Frances became Frank after looking in the mirror, and both Snow and Bird sometimes do not appear in mirrors. As the evil step-mother, Boy asks her mirror for advice: “Mirrors see so much. They could help us if they wanted to. In those days I spoke to every mirror in the apartment. I questioned them, told them I didn’t know what to do, but none of them answered me.”
There are several other fairytales that are embedded in the story: we have two versions of Belle Capuchine (both of which are relevant: one version in which a white girl is mistaken for a black girl and one in which Belle Capuchine rules over her poisonous garden); Anansi the spider tales; and the story of the magician and the woman who never changes (her own perceptions trump the magic). She is the same woman within which a snake resides and we are left to understand that she is the frigid representation of Boy. Boy’s quest at end to break Frank/Frances’s spell also rests on perception. Whether or not Boy can bring Frances “back” is determined not by reality, but by whether or not Boy can make Frances believe that she is Boy’s mother.
As for the writing itself, Oyeyemi has great turns of phrase. I have a few of my favorite quotes below:
“I’ll take the appraisal of my male peers over that any day. Four out of five of them either ignored me or were disgustingly kind, the way nice boys are to the plainest Jane they know. But that was only four out of five. Number five tended to lose his balance for some reason and follow me around making the most extraordinary pleas and offers.”
“I’ve always been pretty sure I could kill someone if I had to. Myself, or my father—whichever option proved most practical. I wouldn’t kill for hatred’s sake; I’d only do it to solve a problem. And only after other solutions have failed. That kind of bottom line is either in your character or it isn’t, and like I said, it develops early.”
“Time and time again the power of an idea or a piece of art was assessed by either its beauty or its technique or its usefulness, and time and time again my wife was surprised by how rarely anything on earth satisfies all three camps.”
“That’s the ideal meeting…once upon a time, only once, unexpectedly, then never again.”
“School is one long illness with symptoms that switch every five minutes so you think it’s getting better or worse. But really it’s the same thing for years and years.”
Oyeyemi also does a very interesting thing with perspective twice in the novel. In the first chapter of the book, Boy jumps from 1st person to 2nd person in order to describe her home life and then in the first chapter of the 2nd section of the book, Bird also jumps perspective (1st person to 3rd person) for a few pages to describe herself. This was a great way to grab the reader’s attention and to distance the narrator from potentially difficult revelations. I find 2nd person narration always to be slightly alarming (most especially and well done in Grimsley’s Winter Birds), but the change from 1st to 3rd had a similar effect. Overall, it was a very unusual and creative way to highlight these descriptive passages and the difficulty that the character had in revealing herself.
Finally, it seems that I keep coming across this notion of parallel worlds (thank you quantum physics for being omni-present). After all, what is Boy’s thought that her mother could either be alive or dead as long as she doesn’t go looking for the answer than just another version of Schroedinger’s cat problem? There was also the instance in which Boy sees another version of herself bloody through the trees and Kazim’s comic strip moral that “What’s next is what happened before.” I’m not sure that any of this was necessary to the rest of the book’s themes, unless Oyeyemi simply wanted to make a point about perception determinating which one of the parallel worlds in which we reside.
Overall, the book is enchanting. It is compelling, entertaining, at times profound, and deals with some great questions about perception and human interaction. I would recommend it highly.
February 2, 2015 update: Interviewed in blogpost: https://beyondbestsellers.wordpress.com/
August 17, 2018
2.5 stars
It was all going pretty well until the very end when the author threw in a hand grenade and for me changed the whole nature of the book. It is impossible to review this book effectively without discussing the end and so there are spoilers ahead. A warning in case you intend to read it.
It is a retelling of the Snow White story set in the America of the 1950s and 1960s and focuses on racism and passing. In this context passing relates to a member of one racial group passing as a member of another racial group. In this novel as in Passing by Nella Larsen it involves people of an African American heritage passing as white.
The plot: Boy Novak lives with her abusive father Frank; he is a rat catcher and is abusive in very cruel and unusual ways. At twenty she leaves home and moves to the small town of Flax Hill. There she eventually marries Arturo Whitman, a widower with a young daughter called Snow. They have a child whom they name Bird. This child is born black and Boy discovers that some of Arturo’s family were indeed African American. There are two main narrative voices. Boy narrates the first (and best) part of the book. Her daughter Bird narrates the second part of the book and Boy the final part. When Bird is born Snow (who is blonde) is sent to live with an aunt. Bird as she grows up becomes aware she has a half-sister. It is really well written and the characters are engaging (apart from Frank the rat catcher). There is humour and a serious examination of racism almost through the medium of fairy tale. The plot is intriguing and who can resist a beginning like this:
“Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. I’d hide myself away inside them, setting two mirrors up to face each other so that when I stood between them I was infinitely reflected in either direction. Many, many me’s. When I stood on tiptoe, we all stood on tiptoe, trying to see the first of us, and the last. The effect was dizzying, a vast pulse, not quite alive, more like the working of an automaton.”
Then there are perceptive comments on Passing:
“I may or may not have hated my own face sometimes. I may or may not have spent time thinking of ways to spoil it somehow. (Maybe that answers your question about being “beautiful.”) But I’m slowly coming around to the view that you can’t feel nauseated by the Whitmans and the Millers without feeling nauseated by the kind of world that’s rewarded them for adapting to it like this.”
It’s all stimulating and what I would expect from Oyeyemi, but then comes the ending. A journalist friend of Boy’s researches into her past and makes a discovery. Her mother was called Frances and was a lesbian. She was raped and gave birth to Boy. And then:
“Her distress had hardened. You know how Frank says he became Frank? He says he looked in the mirror one morning when he was still Frances, and this man she’d never seen before was just standing there, looking back. Frances washed her face and fixed her hair and looked again and the man was still there, wearing an exact copy of her skirt and sweater. He said one word to her to announce his arrival. What he did was, he flicked the surface of his side of the mirror with his finger and thumb and he said: ‘Hi.’ After that he acted just like a normal reflection; otherwise she would’ve felt like she had to go to a psychiatrist and complain about him. Once she’d established he was there to stay, she named him Frank.”
Boy’s mother was transgender. At the end of the novel Boy, her friend, Bird and Snow set off to see Frank because they are convinced Frances is still in there somewhere.
As one reviewer has rather scathingly summed up the ending and the attitude to someone who is transgender:
1. Transgenderism is the result of trauma.
2. Transgenderism is something that can (and should) be “cured.”
3. Being transgendered causes you to turn into an abusive sociopath and shove starving rats in your child’s face.
This may be doing Oyeyemi a disservice, but the ending is problematic and I can see why many (including me) find it offensive. This is a shame because the rest of the book works well.
It was all going pretty well until the very end when the author threw in a hand grenade and for me changed the whole nature of the book. It is impossible to review this book effectively without discussing the end and so there are spoilers ahead. A warning in case you intend to read it.
It is a retelling of the Snow White story set in the America of the 1950s and 1960s and focuses on racism and passing. In this context passing relates to a member of one racial group passing as a member of another racial group. In this novel as in Passing by Nella Larsen it involves people of an African American heritage passing as white.
The plot: Boy Novak lives with her abusive father Frank; he is a rat catcher and is abusive in very cruel and unusual ways. At twenty she leaves home and moves to the small town of Flax Hill. There she eventually marries Arturo Whitman, a widower with a young daughter called Snow. They have a child whom they name Bird. This child is born black and Boy discovers that some of Arturo’s family were indeed African American. There are two main narrative voices. Boy narrates the first (and best) part of the book. Her daughter Bird narrates the second part of the book and Boy the final part. When Bird is born Snow (who is blonde) is sent to live with an aunt. Bird as she grows up becomes aware she has a half-sister. It is really well written and the characters are engaging (apart from Frank the rat catcher). There is humour and a serious examination of racism almost through the medium of fairy tale. The plot is intriguing and who can resist a beginning like this:
“Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. I’d hide myself away inside them, setting two mirrors up to face each other so that when I stood between them I was infinitely reflected in either direction. Many, many me’s. When I stood on tiptoe, we all stood on tiptoe, trying to see the first of us, and the last. The effect was dizzying, a vast pulse, not quite alive, more like the working of an automaton.”
Then there are perceptive comments on Passing:
“I may or may not have hated my own face sometimes. I may or may not have spent time thinking of ways to spoil it somehow. (Maybe that answers your question about being “beautiful.”) But I’m slowly coming around to the view that you can’t feel nauseated by the Whitmans and the Millers without feeling nauseated by the kind of world that’s rewarded them for adapting to it like this.”
It’s all stimulating and what I would expect from Oyeyemi, but then comes the ending. A journalist friend of Boy’s researches into her past and makes a discovery. Her mother was called Frances and was a lesbian. She was raped and gave birth to Boy. And then:
“Her distress had hardened. You know how Frank says he became Frank? He says he looked in the mirror one morning when he was still Frances, and this man she’d never seen before was just standing there, looking back. Frances washed her face and fixed her hair and looked again and the man was still there, wearing an exact copy of her skirt and sweater. He said one word to her to announce his arrival. What he did was, he flicked the surface of his side of the mirror with his finger and thumb and he said: ‘Hi.’ After that he acted just like a normal reflection; otherwise she would’ve felt like she had to go to a psychiatrist and complain about him. Once she’d established he was there to stay, she named him Frank.”
Boy’s mother was transgender. At the end of the novel Boy, her friend, Bird and Snow set off to see Frank because they are convinced Frances is still in there somewhere.
As one reviewer has rather scathingly summed up the ending and the attitude to someone who is transgender:
1. Transgenderism is the result of trauma.
2. Transgenderism is something that can (and should) be “cured.”
3. Being transgendered causes you to turn into an abusive sociopath and shove starving rats in your child’s face.
This may be doing Oyeyemi a disservice, but the ending is problematic and I can see why many (including me) find it offensive. This is a shame because the rest of the book works well.
August 13, 2023
3.5
This is more of a plot-driven book than the others by Oyeyemi that I prefer, but I still found it hard to put down: She’s such a great storyteller. Though all the bits didn’t coalesce for me by the end, and I think I spotted a minor continuity error, I know I’m being picky.
Upon reflection (pun intended), themes appear: the effect of one’s appearance upon others; the effect of a traumatic childhood upon one’s sense of self, carrying into adulthood. I’m not sure I’m completely satisfied by all of this concerning Boy’s parentage or the qualms of beauty that others can’t see past. However, I found the end-effect of the title’s trio of nouns very satisfying.
This is more of a plot-driven book than the others by Oyeyemi that I prefer, but I still found it hard to put down: She’s such a great storyteller. Though all the bits didn’t coalesce for me by the end, and I think I spotted a minor continuity error, I know I’m being picky.
Upon reflection (pun intended), themes appear: the effect of one’s appearance upon others; the effect of a traumatic childhood upon one’s sense of self, carrying into adulthood. I’m not sure I’m completely satisfied by all of this concerning Boy’s parentage or the qualms of beauty that others can’t see past. However, I found the end-effect of the title’s trio of nouns very satisfying.
September 7, 2020
There was something about this novel that I did not like, though I am not sure I what it is, let alone describe it in words. Maybe it was less something I did not like as much as something that was missing.
I see what Oyeyemi was trying to do with Boy, Snow, Bird. She took Snow White and tried to use it as a vessel to make a statement on race and racism. It works, yet only to a point. Then it seemed like she was simply trying a little excessively, stretching it where it did not feel right in the storytelling.
Snow is a perfect child externally, beauty having graced her in everyway. Her mother, Julia, now gone, had a beautiful voice and has an almost mysterious power over the family she left behind, casting a shadow over her husband Arturo's new family. Casting an ever darker shadow is Arturo and Boy's new daughter, Bird, born dark, revealing the African American ancestry in Arturo's family history, before now successfully hidden (even though one daughter was already exiled to serve this purpose).
More importantly, I did not really like any of the characters. Either because of or in spite of fact that there was not much character depth. Even the background on Boy seems to be purposely veiled in mystery, even as they are told as facts. I definitely did not like Boy (she does not try to claim she is anything but a bad person anyways), not Snow (seemed pretty fake and unreal, completely unrelatable), not Bird (I appreciated her fierceness, but she seemed an unreliable narrator at best), not Arturo, Boy's husband who she does not even love because she loves her hometown sweetheart who she purposely pushes out of her life (seems harsh never really get to know him). The only character I kinda liked was Mia, Boy's best friend, and we are not able to learn by much about her. She is a journalist and brings about one good thing, the ending in which all of them set out to find Boy's mother (who is actually her villain stepfather, a transgender).
All the elements were here for me to like this one. I love fairytale adaptations, especially unique ones. The magical realism was there (both Snow & Bird supposedly could not see themselves in mirrors sometimes). I liked the dark histories, the secrets, the parallels to Snow White. But the whole was less than the sum of its parts.
I see what Oyeyemi was trying to do with Boy, Snow, Bird. She took Snow White and tried to use it as a vessel to make a statement on race and racism. It works, yet only to a point. Then it seemed like she was simply trying a little excessively, stretching it where it did not feel right in the storytelling.
Snow is a perfect child externally, beauty having graced her in everyway. Her mother, Julia, now gone, had a beautiful voice and has an almost mysterious power over the family she left behind, casting a shadow over her husband Arturo's new family. Casting an ever darker shadow is Arturo and Boy's new daughter, Bird, born dark, revealing the African American ancestry in Arturo's family history, before now successfully hidden (even though one daughter was already exiled to serve this purpose).
More importantly, I did not really like any of the characters. Either because of or in spite of fact that there was not much character depth. Even the background on Boy seems to be purposely veiled in mystery, even as they are told as facts. I definitely did not like Boy (she does not try to claim she is anything but a bad person anyways), not Snow (seemed pretty fake and unreal, completely unrelatable), not Bird (I appreciated her fierceness, but she seemed an unreliable narrator at best), not Arturo, Boy's husband who she does not even love because she loves her hometown sweetheart who she purposely pushes out of her life (seems harsh never really get to know him). The only character I kinda liked was Mia, Boy's best friend, and we are not able to learn by much about her. She is a journalist and brings about one good thing, the ending in which all of them set out to find Boy's mother (who is actually her villain stepfather, a transgender).
All the elements were here for me to like this one. I love fairytale adaptations, especially unique ones. The magical realism was there (both Snow & Bird supposedly could not see themselves in mirrors sometimes). I liked the dark histories, the secrets, the parallels to Snow White. But the whole was less than the sum of its parts.
March 28, 2014
This is disturbing, bizarre, and overly ambitious. I can see what the author was trying to do, but it didn't quite work. Too many loose ends, questionable behaviors, and a late plot twist out of nowhere added up to a disappointing read for me.
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