Sarah's Reviews > Boy, Snow, Bird

I put off reading this for years because I wanted to have it to look forward to, but picked it up recently because I started worrying I would die before I got to it. So glad I read it in my lifetime because it was glorious. Oyeyemi gets better and better.

I love this answer Oyeyemi gave in a Guardian interview:

All your books seem to be about migration and the need to belong.

No, no! This is a thing people always talk to me about, but with The Icarus Girl, I wanted to write a doppelganger story. White is for Witching was my haunted-house/vampire story. But people get a bit excited if there's a black person and say, "Oh this is about that thing" when actually it's about expanding the genre of haunted house stories.

Way to shut it down (and what a facile, aggravating line of questioning). It’s so true that we assume immigrant stories must be a quest for acceptance - in part because those were the only stories about immigrants that were getting published for so long - but acceptance seems to be beside the point in Boy, Snow, Bird (it’s often beside the point for immigrants). Oyeyemi has a lot to say about race, but the gruesome fairytale-ness of Boy, Snow, Bird is universal. When you already know acceptance isn’t an option and you’re faced with an existential threat, sometimes your choices are dark, maybe violent.

Just imagine what Oyeyemi will be writing at 65. I’m not sure the world is good enough for that.