I received Boy, Snow, Bird from an earlier CBR book exchange, but it had been collecting dust for a few years. I finally had a reason to pick it back up when my Mocha Girls Read book club selected it for a fairytale’s retold theme. Helen Oyeyemi’s novel is a VERY loose version of Snow White set in the 1950s.
Boy Novak runs away to a small town to escape her abusive father. She meets a man named Arturo who isn’t quite a prince, but he adores her. After sort of wearing her down and her own loneliness, she marries him and becomes stepmother to Snow, his beautiful daughter. Boy’s childhood made her very cold and odd, but she becomes almost terrified with jealousy of Snow. When her own child is born, Bird, she banishes Snow to live with Arturo’s sister out of state. The remainder of the book is told through Bird’s eyes as she observes her dysfunctional family.
MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW
When Bird is born, Boy learns that her husband Arturo isn’t Italian but actually black. His light skin allows him and passing parents all the caucasian benefits of the time. Even tho they live in the North, they decide it’s better to be passing than live as African Americans. Snow is the actual fairest of them all and forced to live in the South with her Aunt who herself was banished for being born with dark skin. But that’s not why Boy hated Snow, she literally thinks Snow has malicious intentions for her. Boy’s abusive upbringing left her it seems with some PTSD. She stares into mirrors and sees the worst in herself and others. Bird eventually brings them all back together to uncover a secret this time from Boy’s childhood. As if the story needed another twist, we learn her physically and verbally abusive father was actually HER MOTHER. Boy was a product of rape and to cope with it, her mother decides to dress like a man and eventually lives as one moving forward. As her father, he tortures Boy for years. When Boy learns the truth, she decides to take Snow and Boy on a road trip to reunite with her mother. The end! That ending left me more confused and suspect of the gender implications of the entire book.
My book club, needless to say, wasn’t a big fan. I think I was the most generous to the story that meeting. It was well-written, but at times overly poetic. My biggest issue was the gaps in the story from the multiple narrators. Once we start moving along with the drama, the part ends and a new narrator takes over years in the future. Bird’s section took me several pages to realize she was the protagonist.
I am curious to read other books from this author since her writing did hold my attention. If you are a fan of family drama with dark twists, this is an interesting read. If you need a very tight plot, this is probably not the book for you!
I’m pretty rarely actually offended by books, but the ending of this one left such a bad taste in my mouth. It says nothing good about women, about men, or about transgender people. Also, the point of it was???? She let the twist be there in place of actual resolution. I do not get the praise for this author at all.
Um SPOILERS anyone who hasn’t read the book:
This is what I said in my review. I knew I had some thoughts!:
“. I see what Oyeyemi was going for, since all the characters in the novel are obsessed with mirrors and reflections, and the Whitmans passing as white is a direct parallel to a woman ‘passing’ as a man. But the parallel doesn’t work, mostly because the way it’s written makes it seems like the Rat Catcher only lives as a man now because of that trauma, and not because it’s who he should have been all along. It also has the added implication that people who are trans are not legitimately the genders they choose, but are only passing, just as the Whitmans (who are very clearly portrayed as people who can’t accept their true identities). It was all extremely problematic and completely soured the rest of the book for me.”
Exactly! I get the trauma and pretending to be a man to avoid future trauma as a choice. But it doesn’t shake out as some sort of psyche split especially since there aren’t any chapters from the Ratcatcher’s POV.