Audio-book Review
By Chet Yarbrough
Blog: awalkingdelight
Website: chetyarbrough.blog
Boy, Snow, Bird
By: Helen Oyeyemi
Narrated by: Susan Bennett, Carra Patterson
Nigerian author raised in London since the age of four.
Helen Oyeyemi tells the complicated life of a 20-year-old woman who chooses to run away from home. In the 20th century, running away from home was a child of 13 to 17, not 20. Today, being 20 and running away from home implies a 21st century economic reality. Every run-away has their own reason for leaving home. It can be a social, economic, emotional, or a combination of reasons. Oyeyemi’s main character, Boy, seems a combination. However, societal dysfunction seems at the heart of her story.
Robert Jones addresses America’s “equal rights” failures in “White Too Long”. Oyeyemi’s story exemplifies that observation.
Boy is a young white woman who is unhappy with her father who abuses her emotionally with a trace of physical abuse. Boy in preparation for her flight secrets enough money to take a bus ride from New York City to the Boston area. Something is odd about Oyeyemi’s main character. Why would a parent name their daughter “Boy”?
Boy explains her father demands participation in his rat catching business that supports their family. Her father explains Boy’s mother is dead and that this is their life now. The story drags a bit in its first chapters because Boy seems a typical run-away looking for whatever work she can find to pay her rent and eat.
Boy meets her future husband whom she commits to but not for love but an undefined need that may be as simple as security or companionship.
Boy’s future husband is an educated historian who chooses to leave a professorship to become an artisan who makes odd jewelry. He has a young daughter from a former marriage and has disappointed his family by abandoning his professorship. His daughter’s name is Snow. Snow is characterized as a blond grade school age beauty with excellent social skills that endears her to others.
With this character introduction, the story takes a dramatic turn. Boy becomes pregnant. Her child is black rather than white.
Her new husband, who appears white, is of mixed parentage. He has an obviously black sister who is estranged from their mother though he stays in touch with her. Boy names her newborn “Bird”. Boy decides to send Snow to live with her husband’s sister while she raises Bird. The separation of Snow from her father and Boy estranges her from her stepmother. However, she manages to become a private detective in her new home with her father’s sister.
Oyeyemi further complicates her unusual story with a reveal about Boy’s life with her father. Her father is a transgender woman who cared for Snow’s mother after she had been raped by a black man. She became pregnant with Boy.
An author in Oyeyemi’s epilogue becomes interested in Boy’s life. The author begins researching Boy’s life. She finds Boy’s mother’s death had left her to the care of a transgender “father”. The dynamics of these many relationships reveal the complications of gender and race in American society. There is something interesting about Oyeyemi’s story, but its fundamental value is in its creativity, not its revelations about race and gender or America’s failure to equitably deal with social dysfunction.
REVIEWS AND VIEWS OF LIFE 