Boy, Snow, Bird
By Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi wins this month’s award for “book I’m most curious about.” Her newest novel, Boy, Snow, Bird takes inspiration from Snow White and wicked stepmothers in order to launch a complex discussion about race, identity, beauty and suffering.
The setting is 1950s New England. The title comes from the names of three women—Boy, a white woman who marries into a family who “passes,” only to give birth to daughter Bird, whose skin color reveals the father’s racial lineage. Snow, the father’s daughter from a previous union, appears to be the beautiful princess in this twisted fairy tale, and yet she endures internal turmoil due to the obsessive attention she receives from admirers. “Skin as white as snow,” anyone? This novel promises to help readers unpack whiteness as a beauty norm.
Oyeyemi rejected the M.F.A. workshop life and writes with image-ingrained lyrical complexity despite it. Porochista Khakpour writes in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, “The greatest joy of reading Oyeyemi will always be style: jagged and capricious at moments, lush and rippled at others, always singular, like the voice-over of a fever dream.” Boy, Snow, Bird appears to be one of those novels that linger in the conscience long after that final page is turned.
