* Description
* "Gloriously unsettling...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."
--The New York Times Book Review
"With her fifth novel, 29-year-old Helen Oyeyemi has fully
transformed from a literary prodigy into a powerful, distinctive
storyteller...[Boy, Snow, Bird is] transfixing and surprising."
--Entertainment Weekly
"The outline of [Oyeyemi's] remarkable career glimmers with pixie
dust... Her latest novel, Boy, Snow, Bird, continues on this
bew path...the atmosphere of fantasy lingers over these
pages like some intoxicating incense....Under Oyeyemi's spell,
the fairy-tale conceit makes a brilliant setting in which to
explore the alchemy of racism, the weird ways in which identity
can be transmuted in an instant -- from beauty to beast or vice
versa."
--Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"By transforming 'Snow White' into a tale that hinges on race and
cultural ideas about beauty -- the danger of mirrors indeed --
Oyeyemi finds a new, raw power in the classic. In her hands, the
story is about secrets and lies, mothers and daughters, lost
sisters and the impossibility of seeing oneself or being seen in
a brutally racist world... [Oyeyemi] elegantly and inventively
turns a classic fairy tale inside out."
--Los Angeles Times
"Oyeyemi is something rare -- a born novelist, who gets better
every book. Boy, Snow, Bird is an enchanting retelling of Snow
White that mixes questions of beauty and vanity with issues of
race."
--Cosmopolitan
"[Oyeyemi] is the literary heir of the late, great Angela Carter,
a writer whose fiction glides from swirling archetype and
folklore to the wised-up observations of a thoroughly modern
womanhood."
--Laura Miller, Salon
"This imaginative novel explores identity, race and family,
arguing in brilliant language that black, white, good, evil,
beauty and monstrosity are different sides of a single, awesome
truth."
--People
"Superbly inventive...examines the thorniness of race and the
poisonous ways in which vanity and envy can permeate and distort
perception."
--O, The Oprah Magazine
"[Boy, Snow, Bird] explores powerful themes, such as
self-perception, race relations, and the role appearance plays in
relationships."
--Real Simple
"Like Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter in the '80s, and Jeanette
Winterson in the '90s, Oyeyemi has taken a page from Lewis
Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" and inverted it, turning the
malevolence of a reflecting gaze upon itself, and making it,
possibly, amazingly, a positive thing. This -- more than her
narrative special effects -- is the extraordinary feat of Boy,
Snow, Bird. In her first four books, Oyeyemi wrote with the same
chilly precision as Patricia Highsmith. The performance was
mesmerizing, sinister, and creepy. With this book she proves an
even great ability: she can thaw a heart."
--John Freeman, Boston Globe
"Like Hitchcock, Oyeyemi is interested not merely in what happens
when you attempt to pass for someone else, but in the porous
boundaries between one self and another... [Boy, Snow, Bird is]
an intriguing, sinuously attractive book."
--The Guardian
"[A] rare contemporary novel that's not afraid to confront race.
It's also the rare novel that isn't heavy-handed or humorless
while doing it... I wouldn't be surprised if it's remembered as
one of the great passing narratives, one that stands proudly
along Nella Larsen's Passing and Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow
of Tradition."
--Grantland
"Riveting, brilliant and emotionally rich...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
complexities of love in all its guises."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Oyeyemi wields her words with economy and grace, and she rounds
out her story with an inventive plot and memorable characters."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This novel is some kind of wonderful."
--Ebony.com
"Potent and vividly written...Oyeyemi is a wizard with
metaphor...you haven't got a pulse if you're not shocked by the
reveal at the end."
--NOW Magazine
"Defies classification...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...Stunning and enchanting."
--Slate
"Helen Oyeyemi is a freaking genius. Her books are so bizarre and
brilliant... Write this one down somewhere you'll remember - like
your forehead - because you don't want to miss it."
--Bookriot
"Incandescent...stunning...utterly enchanting."
--A.V. Club
"This is the novel that will get everybody to agree that Helen
Oyeyemi is operating on another level, if they haven't admitted
that already. Bending and twisting fairy tales, Oyeyemi is
capable of a sort of magic that will leave you ping for
breath."
--Flavorwire
"Oyeyemi's [voice is] startlingly distinctive yet always
undulating...[Boy, Snow, Bird is] a fresh, memorable tale."
--The Huffington Post
"Both exquisitely beautiful and strange... Oyeyemi casts a
powerful light on the absurdities accompanying the history of
race in America and the Western world, while taking us to the
landscape of Grimm's Fairy Tales. She brilliantly raises the
questions of what identifies us racially: Is it our color? Our
genes? Our history? Our culture?...It is a powerful examination
of the way we see others and the way others see us. And therein
lies the beauty of Oyeyemi's tale; we all are not, as Boy, Snow,
Bird convinces us, what we appear to be, even to ourselves."
--Dallas Morning News
"Boy, Snow, Bird is Helen Oyeyemi's fifth novel, and it just
might be her finest. It's certainly her most readily
accessible.... How [her characters] try and tragically fail to
relate to one another proves particularly powerful, as
exemplified by the perversely gratifying last act...I couldn't
have stopped reading at this point if I'd wanted to.... a
beautiful book."
--Tor.comEdition: Reprint
Number of Pages: 336
Genre: Fiction + Literature Genres
Sub-Genre: Literary
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Age Range: Adult
Author: Helen Oyeyemi
Language: English
Estimated shipping dimensions: 5.0INCH X 7.9INCH X 1.0INCH
DPCI : 247-39-9578
UPC : 9781594633409
TCIN : 16784692
Estimated shippimg weight: 0.52POUND
