Shards of her face emerged through brown bark and greenish shadows. Her left eye was aligned with mine; we raised our left hands at the same time, and hers was bloody. She said: “I don’t know what to do.” [p. 60]
Boy Novak is nineteen years old in 1953, at the opening of Boy, Snow, Bird: raised by her father Frank, a ratcatcher, she never knew her mother. She flees Frank's violent abuse and ends up in the little New England town of Flax Hill, where she meets and eventually marries widower Arturo Whitman. Whitman has a daughter from his first marriage, named Snow, whom Boy has complicated emotions about. And then Boy gives birth to a daughter -- Bird -- who is ... not white: thus giving the lie to Arturo's surname and to his family's carefully-crafted identity.
This novel reshapes the Snow White story, with Boy as the 'evil' stepmother, and a number of deceptive mirrors. The middle section of the novel is told from Bird's viewpoint, bracketed by Boy's: Bird, growing up mixed-race in the 1960s, has very different perceptions of her mother and her exiled sister Snow. She also has an uneasy relationship with her reflection, which is not always actually a reflection. And this, it turns out, is something that she shares with Boy's mother, who looked in the mirror and saw a stranger.
There's a lot to unpick in this novel: questions of identity, of heritage, of deception. What does it mean to pass as something you're not? Who, if anyone, does Boy actually love? Is anyone telling the whole truth about who and what they are?
The prose is beautiful, the characters rounded, Boy not wholly likeable. I felt the ending was too abrupt, too inconclusive: and I'd have liked to read more of Snow's perspective, and more of Kazim Bey who inks comics for Marvel and seems to be able to do actual magic. I think Boy, Snow, Bird would bear multiple rereadings, but that ending would always wrongfoot me.
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