But I don’t care what the magic mirror says; Oyeyemi is the cleverest in the land ... Oyeyemi aggravates our anxieties about maternal jealousy and the limits of parental love, subjects we’ve been trained from childhood to consider in black and white ... Oyeyemi proves herself a daring and unnerving writer about race. This isn’t one more earnest novel to reward white liberals for their enlightenment... Boy, Snow, Bird wants to draw us into the dark woods of America’s racial consciousness, where fantasies of purity and contamination still lurk. Under Oyeyemi’s spell, the fairy-tale conceit makes a brilliant setting in which to explore the alchemy of racism ... Oyeyemi captures that unresolvable strangeness in the original fairy tales that later editors — from Grimm to Disney — sanded away.
This book pivots so many times around glances and mirrors and reaction shots that a reader will likely feel not tugged but hurled through Alice’s looking glass ... On occasion, Oyeyemi’s restlessness has worked against itself — consuming and deconstructing a story faster than it can be made. Boy, Snow, Bird is the first where that never happens. The splintering of this story creates exactly the kind of prism Oyeyemi seeks to illuminate ... [Oyeyemi's ability to turn the malevolence of a reflecting gaze upon itself, and make it, possibly, amazingly, a positive thing]— more than her narrative special effects — is the extraordinary feat of Boy, Snow, Bird ... With this book [Oyeyemi] proves an even great ability: she can thaw a heart.
... gloriously unsettling ... Oyeyemi’s confidence is palpable — it’s clear that this is the book she’s been waiting for ... The Snow White bits take over, with the Wicked Stepmother and the mirror motifs, and the fairy tale rewrites itself in startling ways ... Still, the greatest joy of reading Oyeyemi will always be style: jagged and capricious at moments, lush and rippled at others, always singular, like the voice-over of a fever dream ... Her sentences occasionally flirt with banality, and when they do, you notice — but this could be an Oyeyemi illusion ... Oyeyemi picks myths and fairy tales because she sees the blood and guts behind the glitter and ball gowns.
As in fairytales, Oyeyemi’s gentle, unforced tone can lull you into overlooking the underlying horror ... Boy, Snow, Bird is an impressive performance marred only by the well-meaning but awkward explanation given at the end of the book for Frank’s abusiveness ... If Oyeyemi tries to do too much, it’s a failing you can forgive.
The risks that Helen Oyeyemi takes in her fifth novel, Boy, Snow, Bird, are astonishing in their boldness ... As the novel's fabulism piles up and complexities become ever more complex, some of the material... feels as if it hails from a psychic as well as a physical dimension where even the most willing reader might not be able to suspend her disbelief. However, one doesn't wish to complain about a writer having too much of an imagination; there are far worse curses, or perhaps they are blessings, to be borne ... This is Oyeyemi's keenest and most moving transformation of a fairy tale we all know...
Oyeyemi isn’t just pulling the rug out from under our feet, playing with our assumptions about how people look—she’s holding a mirror up to our memories of fairy tales and of history. Just as we so desperately want to trust mirrors even though we shouldn’t, perhaps we shouldn’t trust her, no matter how convincing she can be ... It’s not just Boy, Snow, and Bird who, in some way, discover themselves by doubting their mirrors. In the end, one of the novel’s biggest transformations takes place as a result of coming face-to-face with one’s reflection ... stunning and enchanting...
The book struggles to bind [its] threads into a focused and cohesive whole, but readers can easily stay grounded, carried along by Oyeyemi’s crystalline style and vivid imagination ... Oyeyemi tackles an array of themes... and while each aspect is intriguing, readers might feel enervated by too many unresolved storylines ... Ostensibly, Boy, Snow, Bird retells 'Snow White,' but the relationship between these two stories is insignificant... but the similarities are not specific enough to warrant the more superficial connections that Oyeyemi imposes, like references to mirrors and a character named 'Snow.' These cute nods to 'Snow White' are merely that: cute ... Readers wanting a sprawling tale of family secrets will be satisfied as long as they are content to let the characters keep secrets from them as well.
... it appears [Oyeyemi's] finally gotten her recipe just right ... The novel is an intensely dramatic ride ... If there’s one thread to Boy, Snow, Bird that doesn’t quite pay off, it would be that novel is divided tidily into three parts, which initially seems to be a prime opportunity to reflect its triptych of a title. But two parts are told from Boy’s point of view, and one from Bird’s. This leads to Snow seeming less fleshed-out, though she is of utmost importance.
... riveting, brilliant and emotionally rich ... Dense with fully realized characters, startling images, original observations and revelatory truths, this masterpiece engages the reader’s heart and mind as it captures both the complexities of racial and gender identity in the 20th century and the more intimate complexities of love in all its guises.
