mirror (ˈmɪrə)
noun
1. A surface capable of reflecting sufficient diffused light to form an image of an object placed in front of it.
2. Such a reflecting surface set in a frame. In a household setting the surface adopts an inscrutable personality (possibly impish and/or immoral), presenting convincing and yet conflicting images of same object, thereby leading onlookers astray.
For reasons of my own I take note of the way people act when they’re around mirrors.
**Spoilers ahead -- can't write about this book without some**
Like the title, Boy, Snow, Bird is split into three parts (and as an aside, when Dave saw this book in my hand, he declared it the worst title ever). The first part, told from the point of view of Boy Novak -- the pale and beautiful daughter of an abusive rat catcher in mid-20th century NYC -- left me breathless and fascinated: The setup was not quite fairytale but just unreal enough to put me off-balance, and I liked it. This felt like Neil Gaiman for chicks (and I don't say that dismissively -- this beginning resonated with me more than the books I've read by Gaiman; I truly appreciated the feminine touch.) In this first section, Boy runs away from her father, settles into a village of artisans, and marries a widower whose daughter, Snow Whitman, seems too good to be true. Boy notes of Snow, "She was poised and sympathetic, like a girl who'd just come from the future but didn't want to brag about it." When Boy gives birth to a daughter of her own, a family secret is revealed -- her daughter has dark skin and it comes out that her husband's family were only "passing as white", having moved north from a racist community where the lightness of their skin hadn't protected them from prejudice -- and Boy sends Snow away to live with other banished members of the family.
The second section is from the point of view of Bird, Boy's own daughter, and although there are some interesting parts, it all loses steam once Bird discovers her half sister's address and begins a correspondence with Snow: the epistolary structure stops the forward momentum of the story, and although I am willing to be charmed by a couple of Anansi tales (and especially charmed by the notion of talking with irked house spiders), they felt out of place in the letters in a way that the folktale in the first section (as "remembered" and written by Boy and Mia) did not.
The third section is from Boy's perspective again, and although Snow is allowed to return for a visit, it's from Boy's own family that a bombshell is dropped -- it turns out her father, the gruff and nasty Rat Catcher, is actually her mother? A lesbian who was raped and, after giving birth, decided to live as a man? This final reveal was so unnecessary and not in keeping with the rest of the story (except as a tacked-on extension of the not judging a book by its cover theme, I suppose?) that it just annoyed me. By the time this book was done I was left wondering what became of half the characters (what was the point of the three black kids in the bookshop if they could be simply chased away? Mia does some investigative work, but what was the point of Vivian?) and I realised that I never really got to know the main characters: Both Boy and Snow are accused of being evil, but neither acts evil. And Arturo (Snow's father) is simply forgettable alongside the interchangeable grandmothers (I seriously couldn't keep them straight throughout the entire book).
But…I didn't hate this book. I was so intrigued by the rat catcher and his cages of starved and blinded rats -- the menace of his character:
One of the first thing you remember is resting your head against the sink -- you were just washing your hair in it, and you had to take a break because when your hair's wet it's so heavy you can't lift your head without your neck wobbling. So you're resting, and that clean hand descends out of nowhere and holds you facedown in the water until you faint. You come around lying on the bathroom floor. There's a burning feeling in your lungs that flares up higher the harder you cough, and the rat catcher's long gone. He's at work.There was something Rapunzelish about that scene (the weight of the hair, the entrapment), vaguely folkloric, and those were the bits I liked the best: a little girl complaining about an ogre in her room; mirrors that don't show a reflection; an odd doppelganger matching Boy's stride down a steep hill; and in describing first seeing the house Snow lived in:
One of the bigger houses had brambles growing up the front of it in snakelike vines. The smell of baking chocolate-chip cookies aside, it looked like a house you could start fanciful rumors about: "Well, a princess has been asleep there for hundreds of years...”And the notion of Helen Oyeyemi (a woman who was born in Nigeria and raised in England) taking on the Snow White tale and layering on race identity had so much potential -- when the evil stepmother traditionally asks the mirror "Who is the fairest of them all?", I had never considered the meaning of "fairest" beyond "beautiful": of course a little girl with dark skin like Oyeyemi would have been interpreting it as "lightest". Somehow, it just didn't work for me as a race allegory, though. (A further disappointment after the limp Emancipation Day -- yet it's always so interesting to me when books that I pick up without knowing what they're about seem to come in related themes.)
In the end, I'm not disappointed to have read this book and am left intrigued enough to check out some of Oyeyemi's earlier work.
