Boy, Snow, Bird
By: Helen Oyeyemi
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2015
Place of publication: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Language: eng
Number of pages: 316
ISBN-13: 9780143187448
Copyright date: 2014
Subjects: Fiction; Mothers and daughters; Fairy tales; Stepmothers; Adaptations
Description: "[R]ecasts 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."--Back cover.
Notes: "First published in Hamish Hamilton paperback by Penguin Canada Books Inc., 2014"--Title page verso.