Note: I received this ebook from the publisher via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.
Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy.
The beginning: That’s the first line of Boy Snow Bird, and doesn’t it remind you of how much you’ve missed Helen Oyeyemi? In her newest book, a girl named Boy runs away from her abusive father, a rat-catcher, to a small town called Flax Hill. There she meets a man called Arturo Whitman, and maybe she falls in love with him, and she tries not to become a wicked stepmother to his beautiful daughter, Snow.
The end (spoilers in this section only, so skip down to “The whole” if you don’t want to know!): This is actually a good example of a time the benefits of reading the end are objectively evident. At the end Boy Snow Bird, it is revealed that the rat-catcher, Boy’s father, was actually her mother omg shocking twist, who was a queer artsy college type until she was raped, whereupon she retired to a home for girls and found that the person looking out at her from the mirror was a man, so she started acting like one in her real life. And Boy packs up her husband, daughter, and stepdaughter to go “break the spell” the rat-catcher is under. The end.
Okay. Sometimes it happens this way. Sometimes I read the end, and I think: Man, that seems disappointing. I hope the parts of the book I haven’t read make it not disappointing. And I’ll tell you right now that they usually don’t. Usually it’s that the ending isn’t good, but if you’ve read the end before you read the middle, then at least you have a good bit of time to prepare for the ending to not be so good. It won’t be that you reach the very end and get suddenly, abruptly, enormously disappointed.
Not to say that the ending of Boy, Snow, Bird is suddenly and enormously disappointing. Thematically, the reveal at the end works fine — it’s very much in keeping with the book’s themes of identity and fear, and the image clusters with mirrors keep right on coming. It’s dicey, though, in terms of tone and plot, and it’s hella dicey as a portrayal of gender nonconformity.
The whole: Oh, I’ve missed Helen Oyeyemi. She seems to just keep getting better and better at this business of putting books together. Boy Snow Bird has all the matter-of-fact strangeness of her past books, but it feels more carefully assembled than some of her earlier work. Going back through for quotations from it, I keep finding great little bits of foreshadowing and parallel imagery that I missed as I was reading it the first time.
The theme of not being exactly what you look like (of mirrors — literal and metaphorical — being unreliable) runs through the whole book and all of its characters, so that you can never feel confident that what you’re looking at is true. Oyeyemi has no stake in resolving reader discomfort about what’s real; rather, she insists that the reader recognize that reality is flexible, subjective, ever-changing — unreliable.
As for Flax Hill itself, I was on shaky terms with it for the first few months. Neither of us was sure whether or not I genuinely intended to stick around. And so the town misbehaved a little, collapsing when I went to sleep and reassembling in the morning in a slapdash manner. I kept passing park benches and telephone booths and entrances to alleyways that I was absolutely certain hadn’t been there the evening before.
The writing is gorgeous: Helen Oyeyemi has a very particular way of writing that is inimitable and that I love. Here’s some advice Snow receives:
When something catches your attention just keep your attention on it, stick with it ’til the end, and somewhere along the line there’ll be weirdness. I’ve never tried to explain it to anyone before, but what I mean to say is that a whole lot of technically impossible things are always trying to happen to us, appear to us, talk to us, show us pictures, or just say hi, and you can’t pay attention to all of it, so I just pick the nearest technically impossible thing and I let it happen. Let me know how it goes if you try it.
And a description of Snow:
If Snow was ever worried, if any anxieties ever disturbed her for longer than a day, she rarely showed it. She was poised and sympathetic, like a girl who’d just come from the future, but didn’t want to brag about it.
And this just because it made me smile:
Both Gee-Ma and Grammy Olivia have their funerals and coffins and burial plots all paid for, only Grammy Olivia also has a guest list for her funeral and strict instructions that anybody who isn’t on the list can’t come in. This makes Bird’s dad laugh and sigh at the same time and intrigues Bird, because it suggests Grammy Olivia is worried about unsavory characters from her past showing up to damage her reputation.
The ending, as I said above, was troubling from an ideological standpoint, but never mind. I just won’t read the ending next time. I’ll stop early, when Boy gets the black eye that she says is from falling over. I can do that. I do it for Moulin Rouge all the time. The big show ends, the curtain falls, THE END. Or My Fair Lady: “Goodbye, Professor Higgins. You will not be seeing me again.” THE END.
White Is for Witching remains my sentimental favorite of Helen Oyeyemi’s books, but I don’t think there’s much question that Boy Snow Bird is the best of her books so far structurally — polished, elegant, unmerciful.
Cover report: I’d have done something with mirrors, if it were me. I like the way the British cover addresses coloring, which is such an issue in Boy Snow Bird, although the rest of the cover feels like a nonsequitur. I hate the colors and the design of the American cover. British cover wins.