REVIEW: *Boy, Snow, Bird* by Helen Oyeyemi [View all]

Last edited Sat Sep 13, 2014, 12:18 AM - Edit history (3)

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi. 308 pp. Riverhead, 2014.
My rating: 2 stars out of 5

Note: This review CONTAINS SPOILERS. Major spoilers (big plot twists, for example) are set off by warnings preceded by double rules (=====).

Boy, Snow, Bird was the most trying novel-reading experience I've had in years. Oyeyemi is a talented writer; she can pen an evocative scene or phrase with enough magic in it to stop you in your tracks. Yet in Boy, Snow, Bird she mishandles basic aspects of plot and characterization to such a degree that I was left feeling that the publisher did her a disservice in putting this book into bookstores in its current state.

If you were to believe the publisher, Boy, Snow, Bird is a modern reworking of the Snow White story. That's a bit of a stretch. Yes, there are a few minor tie-ins to the fairy tale, but they are slight and easily missed. Yet one can easily understand why the dust-jacket blurb writer promotes the book based on this connection: the novel's plot is so anemic it would be hard to describe the book in an appealing way otherwise.

In a nutshell, here's the story: Boy, the main character, is a young woman at the novel's start, living in New York with her abusive father, a rat-catcher. She runs away from him and starts a life in a small town in Massachusetts, where she marries a man who has a porcelain-skinned daughter named Snow from a previous marriage. Boy has a daughter with her new husband, and this child--named Bird--is born dark-skinned, a consequence of her light-skinned husband's African-American ancestry. For reasons that are never made clear, Boy sends Snow off to be raised by relatives, which engenders some ill-will (note "wicked stepmother" tie-in).

That's about the entirety of the plot. From that point on, the novel meanders aimlessly in its small-town setting. About a dozen forgettable minor characters are introduced who have little to do and are poorly drawn. Since one of the book's main characters, Snow, is sent away, what little of her we know we learn mainly through her letters. Despite the fact that the novel takes place in 1950s America, and has characters with different skin tones, you would think racism and racial identity would be a major theme in the book. Yet the book doesn't contain any memorable scenes of racial interaction and has little to offer in terms of the characters' reflections on race. Odd.

At one point, I found my hopes rising as Oyeyemi introduced some magic involving mirrors and the two sisters, the dark-skinned Bird and the fair-skinned Snow. Both of them, it comes out in their correspondence, have experienced an occasional inability to see their own reflections. But as she does several times in the course of this novel, Oyeyemi plays with this magical idea briefly, then just lets it drop, for whatever reason.

===== MAJOR SPOILER IN GRAF BELOW

Finally, Oyeyemi wraps up the novel with a plot twist that is as bizarre as it is disappointing: Boy's rat-catcher father, we learn, is transgender, having undergone a sex-change operation prior to Boy's birth. In the novel's concluding paragraph, Boy is beginning a road trip with Bird and Snow to locate the rat-catcher. If this sounds intriguing or edgy in my retelling here, I can assure you it's neither in the novel. It feels contrived and inept, and judging from the reviews on GoodReads, has offended many readers.

===== MAJOR SPOILER IN GRAF ABOVE

What saves the novel, to a degree, are Oyeyemi's occasional shows of serious talent. I can think of no better example of this than the novel's opening paragraph, where Boy describes her relationship with mirrors:

Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. I'd hide myself away inside them, setting two mirrors up to face each other so that when I stood between them I was infinitely reflected in either direction. Many, many me's. When I stood on tiptoe, we all stood on tiptoe, trying to see the first of us and the last. The effect was dizzying, a vast pulse, not quite alive, more like the working of an automaton.

No two ways about it: that's a superb opening for a novel that purports to rework the Snow White story.

Oyeyemi can also be funny. At one point in the novel, the character Bird recounts how a family friend described her behavior as a child in a newspaper column:

A six-year-old girl of my acquaintance won't touch canned tuna fish because she believes it to be the flesh of mermaids. Words cannot adequately describe her solemn, speechless anger as tuna salad is served and consumed. It's the anger of one who knows that this barbarism will go down in history and the sole duty of the powerless is to bear witness.

Sadly, such bravura moments are few and far between and cannot erase the book's flaws of weak plotting and forgettable characters.

I give Boy, Snow, Bird two stars out of five. Readers with a particular interest in magic realism may find it worth their while. Most other readers, however, may do better to take a pass.