Boy, Snow, Bird

the long version

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