From the prizewinning author of Mr. Fox , the Snow White fairy tale brilliantly recast as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity. 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.
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“The outline of [Oyeyemi’s] remarkable career glimmers with pixie dust...Her latest novel, Boy, Snow, Bird,
continues on this bewitching path, winding along the forest of make-believe…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.”
—
Washington Post