The
first line of Helen Oyeyemi's Boy,
Snow, Bird could
have been “Once upon a time”. A fairy-tale quality permeates
the story, a modern twist on the Brothers Grimm. A young girl named
Boy lives in New York with a violent father who makes his living as a
rat-catcher, using techniques that would horrify the Pied
Piper. She runs away to the small New England town of Flax Hill,
where she marries a man with a beautiful little daughter named Snow.
After the birth of her own child Bird, Boy becomes something of an
evil stepmother, and the story becomes a distorted version of “Snow
White”, complete with banishment, mirrors, and difficult questions
about who is the fairest of them all.
Oyeyemi's
style retains the rhythm of a fable, but, especially in the portions
where Boy is the narrator, it captures the complex, layered voice of
a modern observer, facing issues that are still unresolved in modern society.
