In this alternative retelling of a famous fairy tale, Helen Oyeyemi pits self-doubt, superficiality, and social norms
against each other in the most vicious and playful of terms
BUY THE BOOK
H
elen Oyeyemi's allegorical tale begins with a simple revelation. Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, says Boy, a young white woman — thus paving the way for the novel more about perceptions than principles, more culpability than color-blindness — to wind down its grim, glorious course.
Winter 1953 finds Boy Novak arriving in a small New England town after fleeing from her abusive father. In no time she weds a widower, Arturo Whitman, and becomes stepmother to his remarkably captivating daughter, Snow.
Soon elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession and color bias start to unravel when Boy gives birth to Arturo's daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned — revealing that the Whitmans are light-skinned African Americans passing for white. Olivia, the grandmother, grand initiator of this denial of ancestry, sees Bird as a reflection of the black heritage that she has long disowned; resenting Bird also means loving Snow, whose mirror image reflects her own fabricated selfhood.
In the aftermath we're still dealt with the ruthlessness of the mirror (Who's the fairest of them all?), more so the tyranny of mothers (Olivia over the Whitmans, Boy over Snow), the urgency of liberation stories-within-stories (a magician's curse to subdue the strength of a woman, a slave's ultimate sacrifice in the pursuit of a better life), and the splintering of perceptions (and age-old prejudices) about beauty, color, gender, identity, image, and self-worth.
Here Oyeyemi employs all tools available at her bidding — clichés that seem to diffuse tension rather than distract, metaphors that dissipate into that which they represent, fantasy elements melded with realism that quell disbelief altogether, themes of parenthood and childhood embroiled in love and loss, and the bold, if not blatant use (or misuse) of established nomenclatures as if to mock conventions (Boy for a woman's name, Bird for a not-so-free daughter, less so Whitman for a black man passing as white) — all with great success. In the end, it prods us to ask ourselves, "What, who do we see in the mirror?" Believe me: the answer is not a simple as you think. 1