Parameters
- 308 pages
- 11 hours of reading
More about the book
This novel is a reimagining of the fairy tale Snow White recast as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity set in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. 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 has 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 would become, but when the birth of Boy's daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white, elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out . Now Boy, Snow, and Bird must confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold. -- From book jacket
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Boy, Snow, Bird, Helen Oyeyemi
- Language
- Released
- 2014
- product-detail.submit-box.info.binding
- (Hardcover)
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- Title
- Boy, Snow, Bird
- Language
- English
- Authors
- Helen Oyeyemi
- Publisher
- Riverhead
- Released
- 2014
- Format
- Hardcover
- Pages
- 308
- ISBN10
- 1594631395
- ISBN13
- 9781594631399
- Series
- Tags
- Fiction, Children's Books, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Fairy Tales & Stories, English Literature, Race, Racism, Magical Realism, Identity, Symbolism
- First published
- 2014
- Original title
- Boy, Snow, Bird
- Rating
- 3.35 out of 5
- Description
- This novel is a reimagining of the fairy tale Snow White recast as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity set in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. 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 has 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 would become, but when the birth of Boy's daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white, elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out . Now Boy, Snow, and Bird must confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold. -- From book jacket