The risks that Helen Oyeyemi takes in her fifth novel, Boy, Snow, Bird, are astonishing in their boldness. “Nobody ever warned me about mirrors,” begins the narrator, Boy, a pale white girl in Manhattan’s East Village whose rat-catcher father beats her until she runs away to a small town in Massachusetts and marries a man she doesn’t love. It is 1953. The man she doesn’t love, a widower, has a small child, also very pale and very beautiful, and very beloved by all, named Snow.
In time, Boy and her husband have their own child, Bird, who is black; this is how Boy discovers that her husband and much of his family have been passing for white. Urged by her husband’s family to give up her telltale baby, Boy instead makes a hard choice: She sends the beloved Snow away. “Snow is not the fairest of them all,” Boy insists. “And the sooner [they all] understand that, the better.” Love, that magical power, makes Boy protective and destructive at once.