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Boy Snow Bird by Helen Oyeyemi discussion guide: Home
Discussion questions, reviews, interviews, readalikes and more.
Articles, Interviews, and Reviews
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White LiesNew York Times Book Review
Feb. 27, 2014 -
Helen Oyeyemi Plays with Myth and FairytaleThe Guardian
Mar. 22, 2014 -
'I Do Not Outline': An Interview with Helen Oyeyemihazlitt.net
Apr. 1, 2014 -
An Interview with Helen Oyeyemi: "Nothing Happens Without my Teapots."Buzzfeed Books
Mar. 10, 2014 -
'Something Just Beyond Words'Believermag
Apr. 25, 2014
Videos about Boy, Snow, Bird
Discussion Questions
Did you enjoy Boy, Snow, Bird?
Are Helen's characters realistic? What do you make of the male characters in the book?
This is a novel that touches on lots of issues: violent abuse, racism, gender issues, family dynamics - how does Helen handle these concerns?
How much is this a book about race? Is this a feminist book?
What parallels can you draw between Boy, Snow, Bird and the Snow White fairy tale?
Do you find any of the women in this story threatening?
Does Boy cast more spells than she is able to break?
Why do you think Boy sends Snow away? Is Snow an unsettling character or an innocent victim?
'I don't look the way I feel' - What degree of control can Boy, Snow and Bird exert over their reflections?
"It's not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness [...] we beat Them (and spare ourselves a lot of tedium and terror) by declining to worship" - How political is Boy, Snow, Bird?
"nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. I’d hide myself away inside them, setting two mirrors up to face each other so that when I stood between them I was infinitely reflected in either direction"
Also by Helen Oyeyemi
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What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by ISBN: 9781594634635Playful, ambitious, and exquisitely imagined, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is cleverly built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical. The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret--Oyeyemi's keys not only unlock elements of her characters' lives, they promise further labyrinths on the other side. -
Mr. Fox by ISBN: 9781594488078Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding, and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, the celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently. Mary challenges Mr. Fox to join her in stories of their own devising; and in different times and places, the two of them seek each other, find each other, thwart each other, and try to stay together, even when the roles they inhabit seem to forbid it. -
White Is for Witching by ISBN: 9780385526050As a child, Miranda Silver developed pica, a rare eating disorder that causes its victims to consume nonedible substances. The death of her mother when Miranda is sixteen exacerbates her condition; nothing, however, satisfies a strange hunger passed down through the women in her family. And then there’s the family house in Dover, England, converted to a bed-and-breakfast by Miranda’s father. Dover has long been known for its hostility toward outsiders. But the Silver House manifests a more conscious malice toward strangers, dispatching those visitors it despises. -
The Opposite House by ISBN: 9780385513845Oyeyemi explores the thin wall between myth and reality through the alternating tales of two young women and their search for the truth about faith and identity. -
The Icarus Girl by ISBN: 9780385513838Jessamy "Jess" Harrison is eight years old. As the child of an English father and a Nigerian mother, Jess just can't shake off the feeling of being alone wherever she goes, and the other kids in her class are wary of her tendency to succumb to terrified fits of screaming. Believing that a change from her English environment might be the perfect antidote to Jess's alarming mood swings, her parents whisk her off to Nigeria for the first time where she meets her mother's familyincluding her formidable grandfather. Jess's adjustment to Nigeria is only beginning when she encounters Titiola, or TillyTilly, a ragged little girl her own age. To Jess, it seems that, at last, she has found someone who will understand her. But gradually, TillyTilly's visits become more disturbing, making Jess start to realize that she doesn't know who TillyTilly is at all.
Reserve a copy
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Boy, Snow, Bird by ISBN: 9781594631399In 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's left behind in New York. She marries Arturo Whitman, a local widower, and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she'd become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy's daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African-Americans passing for white.
Recommended Reading
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The Snow Child by ISBN: 9780316175678Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. -
God Help the Child by ISBN: 9780307594174A young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally, Bride's mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that "what you do to children matters. And they might never forget."
