Boy, Snow, Bird

Boy, Snow, Bird is a novel by the British writer Helen Oyeyemi, published in 2014. It is her fifth novel, and it retells the fairy tale of Snow White as a story about family secrets, race, beauty and vanity in America during the 1950s and 1960s.

Boy Novak is a young white woman whose father, an exterminator she calls the rat catcher, is abusive. In the winter of 1953, when she is twenty, she runs away from him, leaves New York and arrives by chance in a town called Flax Hill in Massachusetts.

There she moves into a tenement house, goes on double dates with another tenant and meets Arturo Whitman, a widower and jewellery designer with a young daughter named Snow. Boy marries him and becomes the stepmother of the fairy tale, and it is only when she has a daughter of her own that the family's secret comes into the open. Oyeyemi has said that the book also drew on Nella Larsen's novel Passing, and it was named among the best books of its year by several American papers.