BOY, SNOW, BIRD
In Boy, Snow, Bird, her 2014 novel, we see glimpses of Oyeyemi’s talent. The book (a loose retelling of the story of Snow White) is written in a breathless first person and opens with a girl called Boy Novak, the daughter of a ratcatcher living in Manhattan during the 1940s. At twenty, she moves to Flax Hill in Massachusetts. All she knows is that it was the last stop on the bus from New York, and that “people make beautiful things” there.
Later, Oyeyemi introduces us to the other two titular characters: Snow, Boy’s step-daughter who is soft and mild and ticks all the boxes of traditional femininity that Boy never did; and her daughter Bird, whose birth triggers a reconfiguring of the family dynamic. When Bird…
