A preview of Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird appeared in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists issue in April last year, the decennial list identifying 20 writers under 40 as the names to watch. The previous four novels of the Nigerian-born Oyeyemi (who was first published at the age of 18) revolve around deeply psychological retellings of folk tales, laced with questions of race, gender and, above all, youth. Her protagonists tend to be ‘seers’, characters somehow displaced from their environment and thereby privileged to construct their own story — the lot of the lonely novelist. Patterned on the tale of Snow White, this latest book, Boy, Snow, Bird turns the seers into the surveyed, characters caught in surreal landscapes which flex and tense around them, fusing the roles of the victim and the villain.
Blessed with the sort of names usually reserved for the children of celebrities, Boy, Snow and Bird are three women at the centre of a New England family saga set in the 1950s and 1960s.
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