Boy, Snow, Bird Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00IU15A24 | Format: EPUB
Boy, Snow, Bird Description
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.
Dazzlingly inventive and powerfully moving, Boy, Snow, Bird is an astonishing and enchanting novel. With breathtaking feats of imagination, Helen Oyeyemi confirms her place as one of the most original and dynamic literary voices of our time.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 9 hours and 19 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Recorded Books
- Audible.com Release Date: March 6, 2014
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00IU15A24
[Spoiler warning: because of the way BOY, SNOW, BIRD is structured, it's difficult to discuss the novel without giving away plot points that emerge around the halfway point. This review won't reveal anything that isn't discussed in the cover copy or implicit in the mythic structure, but readers who want to come to the novel not knowing anything should stop here, with my strong recommendation for this novel about identity and the ambiguities of race, gender, and family life.]
The title of Helen Oyeyemi's excellent new novel derives from the names of its three female protagonists. Boy is Boy Novak, who escapes an abusive childhood in 1950s New York and comes to the Massachusetts town of Flax Hill, eventually marrying local widower Arturo Whitman. Snow is Arturo's daughter, a girl of uncommon beauty who makes Boy obscurely uncomfortable. And Bird is the daughter Boy and Arturo have together, whose dark skin reveals the family's secret: Arturo, his late wife, and their families were all African-Americans passing as white. Boy, worried about what the difference between Snow and Bird will mean for her own daughter and plagued by demons of her own, sends Snow away to live with relatives. But years later, when Bird is a teenager, Snow returns...
Some readers will already have identified the fairy tale of which this is a loose retelling; others will recognize it after learning that Boy, Snow, and Bird all have a strange fascination with mirrors. But the emphasis is on "loose" rather than "retelling:" those expecting a point-for-point recasting of Snow White will be disappointed.
“Boy, Snow, Bird,” by Helen Oyeyemi, is a dark and disturbing novel about self-identity in a complex world simmering with prejudice and misery. The author’s highly stylized prose is unique, stunning, and brilliantly imaginative. The book is full of inventive, dazzling, and lyrical surprises. The tale teems with well-known, as well as quite obscure, fairy tale motifs. The author also enchants by sprinkling magical realism in odd places here and there in the mists of the plot’s everyday reality. The realistic and the magical worlds collide and play off against one another adding emphasis and making the realism appear just that much more grotesque. At times the book reads like a strange brew of marvelous modern macabre.
But this otherwise outstanding book failed me in a significant way. Despite the author’s remarkable and obvious literary talents, I felt emotionally detached from the disturbing subject as well as from the characters. This was a novel that appealed mainly to the intellect rather than the heart. This is primarily why I hesitated and did not give this work five stars. I wanted more of an emotional connection with the characters.
There are three main characters: Boy, Snow, and Bird. Boy is a beautiful, but emotionally damaged woman, the odd survivor of a bizarre abusive childhood. After developing into a ravishing twenty-year-old platinum blond, she manages to escape her dehumanizing family situation and flees to a small town in New England. There she makes a life for herself, meets a young widower, and marries him despite the fact that she is not in love. Boy values freedom too much to allow love to enter her heart. She has never known love; how can she give it?
Snow Whitman is Boy’s husband’s six-year-old daughter.
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