Review: Boy, Snow, Bird - Helen Oyeyemi

Reviewed by Jayne White

The first thing I should tell you is that Boy is actually a girl. Boy, Snow, Bird has confusions and shifting perceptions at its heart. This is Helen Oyeyemi’s fifth novel - a remarkable achievement for someone not yet 30 - and in it, she uses the references and echoes of traditional stories to sketch out her characters and their situations. However, her Cinderellas and her fairy godmothers don’t keep their characters all the way through; they have their wicked moments too.

When we first meet Boy she is living in 1950’s New York with her abusive rat catcher father, her mother having died years ago. This rat catcher is no Pied Piper and eventually drives his beautiful, long-suffering daughter away with his horrific abuse. Cinderella becomes Little Red Riding Hood as she makes her own life and learns to deal with men. Eventually Boy finds her prince, a widower with an angelic little daughter named Snow. All is well with the extended family until Boy has a little girl of her own who she names Bird. Bird is born dark-skinned, revealing the family ‘secret’ that the Whitman family are of mixed ethnicity and ‘pass’ as white by rejecting any unacceptably ‘dark’ children. Boy takes over the wicked queen role by rejecting the fair step-daughter and loving her own child instead.

Beauty is seen as a great gift in the world of fairy tale. However, in the real world, it does not help any of the women in this story. Here when a woman is beautiful, the world turns on her and is suspicious of her. She can’t be believed to be intelligent; she will receive unwanted attention. Boy’s father wants to scar her for life so that she can be certain that any man who is interested in her doesn’t want her for her looks.

One of the most striking magical elements of this story is that the principal female characters cannot see their reflections in a mirror. They are only reflected in other people’s perception of them. We see Boy as a virtuous victim until she rejects her step-daughter. We see Olivia Whitman, the widower's mother, as a fairy godmother until we see her turn on her daughter-in-law because of her child’s dark skin. Snow’s late mother (a singer) lingers on in the recordings of her voice until the old records become worn and she fades away.

This novel is good in many respects. The language flows and for much of the book the balance between fairy tale and reality is delicate and not overly intrusive or disruptive. I have the odd misgiving about how well ‘fairness’ (in the sense it appears in German fairy tales) relates to politically sanctioned racial prejudice in society, but the discomfort is thought-provoking rather than off-putting. However, for me the book is rather weakened by its ending. The author throws in a huge revelation near the end; in my opinion it does not work, and is very disproportionate alongside the rest of the story. She could have dropped a bomb on the narrative and caused less damage. Whilst the revelation is in keeping with the themes explored in the novel, the author isn’t able to bring the threads of the story back together and take it to any kind of satisfactory conclusion.

In spite of my reservations about this novel’s ending, I would still recommend it to anyone who likes a degree of magical realism in their fiction and is interested in women’s roles in society. Sometimes with a book as ambitious as this, an author has room to make mistakes or leave it with an unevenness to the quality while still creating something worthy to be read and discussed.