Boy, Snow, Bird

Description:

This novel is a reimagining of the fairy tale Snow White recast as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity set in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty, the opposite of the life she has left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she would become, but when the birth of Boy's daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white, elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out . Now Boy, Snow, and Bird must confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold. -- From book jacket

subjects: Fairy tales,  Adaptations,  Family secrets,  Passing (Identity),  Stepmothers,  Fiction,  FICTION,  Identity,  Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology,  Literary,  Ethnicity,  FICTION / General,  Personal Beauty,  FICTION / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology,  General,  City and town life,  FICTION / Literary,  Fiction, general,  Large type books,  Folklore,  Fiction, fantasy, historical,  Fairy tales, adaptations

Places: Massachusetts