As seen on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, where it was described as “gloriously unsettling… evoking Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Angela Carter, Edgar Allan Poe, Gabriel García Márquez, Chris Abani and even Emily Dickinson,” and already one of the year’s most widely acclaimed novels: “Helen Oyeyemi has fully transformed from a literary prodigy into a powerful, distinctive storyteller…Transfixing and surprising.”—Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A) “I don’t care what the magic mirror says; Oyeyemi is the cleverest in the land…daring and unnerving… 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.” – Ron Charles, The Washington Post From the prizewinning author of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Gingerbread, and Peaces comes a brilliant recasting of 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 Arturo Whitman, a local widower, and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow. 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. And even as Boy, Snow, and Bird are divided, their estrangement is complicated by an insistent curiosity about one another. In seeking an understanding that is separate from the image each presents to the world, 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.

Boy, Snow, Bird is clearly an attempt at a fairy tale, complete with abandoned children, generational secrets, fluid genders, and allegorical names. We could see that very readily at NUBClub, and we recognized that Oyeyemi leveraged that fairy tale into some nice passages in places. But we had a lot of trouble with the plot of the book. A lot of the book exists in a tonal haze of implied magical realism, but it never really adds up to anything. The strange fascination of Boy with Snow never really makes sense, the symbolism of the Rat Catcher in the early story doesn't become iconic enough to take on myth, and the coincidences of the plot seem contrived rather than serendipitous. The group came to the conclusion that the book just failed at its mythmaking. The allegories about race made sense, but the world just never came into focus enough to add up to some powerful. We were disappointed that the book didn't either go deeper into the allegory and become more lyrical, or get more detailed and ground itself better in reality. Instead, it sits in the middle position, giving Boy and Bird complex and ambiguous feelings but never giving them fully comprehensible motivations, hinting at forces behind the plot but never pulling them enough out of the shadows to make them real either. The whole novel felt vague and incomplete. Boy, Snow, Bird was an interesting concept for a myth, but the execution just didn't commit strongly enough to leave any impression.