Review: Boy, Snow, Bird

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I did it! I finally read something that isn't just science fiction or fantasy! Thanks to my friend Clair for the recommendation!

I'm not sure how I feel about this at all. On one hand, I liked the characters and the prose and the skill with which Oyeyemi can write a relationship and the racialized 1950s take on Snow White. On the other, the story faltered about halfway through, I was never given compelling reasons or resolutions for the way certain relationships and storylines turned out , there was a distinct lack of consistency and unity across the storylines, the whole thing was unsubtle yet muddled about its themes, and I'm very conflicted about Frank.

Plot summary (including spoilers):
The story begins from the perspective of Boy Novak, a girl who has never known her mother, only her abusive father, Frank. She runs away to the idyllic town of Flax Hills and begins life anew doing odd jobs and living at a women's boardinghouse. She makes several friends and goes on lots of dates, and even begins to connect with one of the men she dates. Her two close friends give her two models for the ideal woman's life of the time: Webster marries quickly and happily and settles down into marital bliss, while Mia, a spunky journalist, turns fluffy women's pieces into undercover investigative journalism. Boy is clearly haunted by her past, though; she feels she doesn't know how to properly love. Even as she starts a relationship, she remembers Charlie, the boy she loved at home, and thinks that she can't have someone who truly loves her that way because she doesn't know how to be like that. She finds herself staring into reflective surfaces but actually looking at them. In one alarming incident, her reflection takes on a life of its own.

Eventually, she finds a permanent job at a bookstore and makes friends with the black children who skip school to read in the safe haven of the shelves. She marries her new man, who has a daughter named Snow. Snow is beautiful, with pale skin and dark hair. Everyone adores her, and while she seems older than her age it's not caused by worry, but just a natural strange maturity. Snow's mother, also much adored, is dead, but both of Snow's grandmothers dote on her to a degree that, to Boy who was never loved as a child, seems excessive and spoiling. But Boy loves her just the same. And then Boy's daughter, Bird, is born: Bird is clearly black, and Boy, who is possibly the fairest-skinned of all, has a major conversation with her husband about his background, where it's revealed that he, his dead wife, Snow, and all of Snow's grandparents and family are all light-skinned black people who pass for white.

Snow's grandmothers gently suggest that Bird be sent off with Clara, Snow's dark-skinned aunt who was also sent away in her youth to keep up the family's appearances. Boy refuses. After a while, though, she sees that Snow and Bird (though they get along splendidly) cannot live in the same place without the differences in their treatment doing serious damage to one or both of them. The grandmothers snub Bird and continue to dote on Snow. Everyone in town whispers about Bird but adores Snow. So Boy does send a child to Clara, but she sends Snow. It's partly because of everyone else, but also because she can also see that her resentment of Snow - that she has the love Boy never had and she's taking away Bird's chance for that love - will eventually hurt Snow, as well.

At this point - slightly more than halfway through - the book switches to Bird's perspective. Bird is thirteen; she knows she has a half-sister but has never contacted her. Her father visits Snow a few times a month and occasionally brings back gifts from one girl to the other, but they haven't spoken in more than ten years. She has a close friend named Louis Chen, who she might be in love with and with whom she deals with racist remarks along regular childhood challenges. She's remarkably mature. She decides to contact Snow and the two bond quickly through letters, though there is a brief point of contention. Bird confides in Snow that, sometimes, she doesn't appear in mirrors. Snow responds saying that, if she means it literally, that's a dangerous thing to say - something she knows from personal experience as Snow also is sometimes absent from mirrors. Bird thinks Snow is teasing her, and they drop the subject. Boy, who has been a loving if somewhat distant mother, always willing to do exactly what Bird asks at the drop of a hat, says to be wary of Snow because her sweetness is deceptive. Snow comes to visit for Thanksgiving, causing a huge uproar in the town as everyone wants to see the beautiful young girl who left and has now returned. It seems Bird and Snow get along rather well. Bird is then briefly kidnapped by an old man who takes her to a restaurant, where he tells her he is Frank, Boy's mother. He tells her Boy is evil, among other things. Bird calls Mia, her mother's friend, to get some perspective. (Boy, who hears about it later, kind of agrees with Frank - she thinks she is evil, because she lets bad things happen to people when she could have prevented them.)

After what feels like very little plot happening, the perspective switches back to Boy, who is, predictably, still resentful of Snow. She approaches the girl and tells her that in order for them to ever get along, Snow has to beat her up, like kids did back in New York when Boy grew up. With some prompting, Snow agrees, and then everything is okay. Mia, investigative journalist, contacts Boy and tells her that Mia was the one who let Frank know where Boy lived, and that Mia has been doing some digging to find Boy's mother. And what she's found is that Boy's mother, Frances, was a top research student in a time when women were barely allowed into school, until she was raped, at which point she disappeared. Mia has learned that since her disappearance, Frances has been living as Frank; the loving mother Boy never let herself wish for was the abusive father she lived with. Boy immediately gathers Bird and Snow and Mia and tells them they're going to New York to find Boy's mother. The end.

Now, I feel like several of my problems with the story are pretty clear. I feel like the switch to Bird's perspective and back didn't work. If we'd gotten more time with Bird, if we'd gotten some time with Snow, if it hadn't switched to Bird at all and just stayed from Boy's perspective - any of those would have worked better, in my opinion. I'm not sure why the story focused so much on Bird at all, because the most interesting relationship (and the one we hear the least about) is between Snow and Boy. Is Snow really so perfect that she only has mild feelings about Boy? We don't know.

The ending is abrupt; everything is wrapped up and this family goes on a jolly quest to NYC to find Boy's mother (which will, supposedly, solve all of her issues regarding love and motherhood) in a way that implies all of their issues are essentially worked out, despite the fact that as Boy is gathering them all Bird is emotionally torturing Snow by mimicking her dead mother's singing voice. Boy is still emotionally distant and feels little remorse about Snow; she doesn't seem to have grown or changed since the beginning of the novel, except that now she wants to meet her mother (and any restorative or destructive impact that may have is left off-page). And can we talk about their end goal in New York: finding Boy's mother? Because I'm still not sure how I feel about that. Frances experienced trauma, and that trauma triggered her life as Frank. But prior to the trauma she had an academic history in sexuality, and it seems like she was increasingly masculine throughout her life. It's hard to tell if Frank is a transgender man or if Frances is suffering through trauma, and the novel doesn't seem to address that nuance. It merely validates Boy's blind faith that Frances can be "found" and returned to her by using that as the unifying send-off of the characters.

The prose is beautiful, and the novel has a lot of lovely things to say about the tricky and complicated nature of relationships, love, and motherhood. Boy's fierce but disaffected mothering of Bird shows how someone who doesn't know how to love can find a way to approximate it if they try hard enough, and maybe that's all that matters. But often, the prose was unsubtle, blunt to the point of slapping you in the face with the metaphors and subtext. Bird writes that maybe she doesn't see herself in certain mirrors (like one in her grandmother's house) because those are places Snow occupies. Like, wow. Way to tell us exactly what that previously strange and intriguing phenomenon means in the context of the story, 13-year-old child. Thanks. The novel is slightly more delicate with its treatment of race, though one fairly obvious moment of foreshadowing (Boy's thoughts wandering toward the black children at her bookstore when eating with Snow's family) is essentially described as such later in the novel, when Boy thinks "hmm, could I have foreseen this? Maybe I did, when I thought about those children during that meal." At the same time, though, there's little consistency in any message throughout the novel, no building to a larger meaning. Several scenes seemed to exist only to convey a smaller story with a particular moral, and then had no impact on the larger plot, especially in Bird's section. A generous reading would say that it's because relationships are unique, and even the two people involved can have very different views of the relationship, so one grand message about family/race/love/motherhood/trauma isn't going to work. But it felt to me like Oyeyemi simply didn't weave together these threads well enough to make a patchwork but complete picture of the complicated dynamics at work. Instead, we're left with beautiful, separate patches.

One nitpicky comment - there seem to be a lot of anachronisms in the early portion of the book. Even the tone made it difficult to place when Boy was living; she has the voice of a modern young woman, which I suppose isn't all that different from a woman in the early 1950s, but it felt out of place. Boy's future husband goes jogging regularly - an activity that wasn't common and a name that was not used for that activity until the early 60s and not popularized in America until several years later. The early section of the novel comes across as a kind of achronological "early 1900s America" that takes place in no time but all of them at once (until it needs to take place at specific times, at which point the achronology becomes confusing).

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