Boy, Snow, Bird

The wicked stepmother is one of the most fundamental tropes of the fairy tale genre, probably most famously exemplified in the stories of Cinderella and Snow White. It is the latter that is subtly retold in Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird. Boy Novak grows up in New York City with a mercurial, abusive father that she calls only “the rat-catcher”, and as soon as she can figure out how, runs away as far as the bus line will take her...which turns out to be small-town Massachusetts. Having left behind her childhood sweetheart, she finds herself drawn to Arturo Whitman, a metal smith and widower with a lovely little daughter named Snow. They marry, and things look promising for a while: Boy finds her stepdaughter charming and delightful and soon falls pregnant herself. But when she gives birth, it changes everything. Her own daughter, Bird, is unmistakably of mixed race, revealing that the Whitman family are actually light-skinned African-Americans passing as white.

Arturo's mysterious sister appears, having been sent away as a child when she turned out dark and threatened the family's secret, and offers to take Bird. But Boy doesn't want to part from her own child. Instead, she finds herself increasingly haunted by the adoration lavished on fair-complected Snow by everyone, including the Whitman family, compared to the treatment Bird receives...so Snow is sent away instead. As Bird grows up, she and her sister begin a correspondence, and a piece of Boy's past, long since left behind, draws nearer with revelations which could threaten the life she's built for herself.

I'd previously read Oyeyemi's short story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours and very much enjoyed the way she played with themes, the multiple levels she was operating on at the same time, her richly evocative language. I found many of the same qualities in this novel, and thought Oyeyemi's take on the pervasive issue of race in America was interesting, as she's a black woman but not American. I appreciated the way she subverted expectations by building to what you think is going to be the moment where Boy turns against her stepdaughter by having her inflict the emotional cruelty of exile rather than the usual depiction of verbal and physical abuse. Oyeyemi is a skilled storyteller, and ably walks the line between a story that's interesting and pleasurable to read without sacrificing richer layers of meaning that push you to think. But that ending was...woah.

I'm not going to reveal the ending, even though it had a huge impact on my response to the book as a whole. But I also can't avoid talking about it, because it honestly made me think less of the book because of the way it played out. Oyeyemi places a huge, game-changing detail about a character in the last 5-10 pages of the book, barely giving the others time to react to it. The elicited reaction by the other characters doesn't feel quite earned, but the way that this reveal is made, and the details surrounding it are what really bothered me. In particular, I thought it played into problematic stereotypes about a marginalized community. Either way it was a major plot development and placing it where she did in the book was not effective. I thought I'd be able to recommend this book enthusiastically, but while I do still think it's a good book and worth reading, I'm not quite as sure about it as I might have been.

I read this for the Luther Seminary Book Club. Most of Boy, Snow, Bird is narrated by Boy Novak, a tough blonde girl raised by an abusive, rat catcher father in New York City. She escapes to a small town in Massachusetts and sets about creating a life for herself there, with a kind of fast talking Hollywood dame bravado. The tone of the book is somewhat frothy–you don't doubt that Boy is equal to her challenges.

But Boy marries a widower with a beautiful and beloved daughter, Snow, and gives birth to her own daughter, Bird. Suddenly it's not Boy's well-being you're concerned about anymore.

This story is presented as a reworking of the Snow White fairy tale, and there is a lot that is fairy tale like about it. There is the glimmer of the supernatural at work on the periphery, in small details like Bird and Snow occasionally not appearing in mirrors, and the mysterious lookalike woman Boy meets on an empty road near the beginning of the book. There's the fairy godmother figure in the person of the cranky middle aged widow who runs the bookstore.

There is also hard reality in this fairy tale–the legacy of racism for light skinned African Americans who could “pass” for white, and the hurt in those families for the members who could not pass.

There was so much potential for a really great book, but I thought it failed to deliver. Instead of working out the tangles of Boy's new family by marriage, it asks us to accept that those tangles simply dissolve, while we are diverted back to Boy's beginnings with the rat catcher. Details which seemed significant earlier are dismissed without further development. The ending was a disappointment.