"this is snow white meets the bluest eye meets white teeth meets your evil stepmother for cocktails where she tells her all the secrets about her family & identity & actually it turns out that she’s not evil & what is evil anyway it is a social construct just like race or just like beauty & holy crap I love this book so much."
Publisher Riverhead Trade
Publication Date 2015-03-03
Section New Titles - Paperback / Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Melissa L.-O.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781594633409
The widely acclaimed novel that brilliantly recasts the Snow White fairy tale 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, exposes the Whitman family secret. 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.